Spiel des Lebens (The game of life)

Hamsun’s trilogy tells the story of a man who feels he has been overlooked by the elites that set the tone and cheated of social recognition. The philosopher Ivar Kareno evolves from a 30-year-old radical and anti-liberal writer on the fringes of poverty into a 40-year-old private tutor to the two sons of a businessman in a distant coastal region. Here Kareno sits brooding in his writing tower, while an infectious fever descends on people, arriving from the North, the businessman Otermann is driven mad by his wealth and a strange man wanders between the houses, rumoured to be justice. Ten years later, the 50-year-old Kareno is still hoping for a major turning point in his life. And he will indeed reach a milestone where he must decide whether he will remain true to the radical ideas of his youth or to pursue a career that is more measured politically.   

«I’ve been hearing about this fever all year. But I’m not afraid of it any more.»

The Norwegian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Knut Hamsun has been regarded as a forerunner of literary modernism ever since his debut novel «Hunger» (1890). Between 1895 and 1898 he wrote the Kareno trilogy, in which he appears to predict his own future failings: Hamsun will adopt an increasingly anti-democratic stance and ultimately collaborate with the Nazis. In both the author Hamsun and his character Ivar Kareno one can see creeping processes of radicalisation and the hardening of opinions that are of particular interest from the perspective of our own time. 

Stephan Kimmig, who works at the leading German-speaking theatres, will direct «The Game of Life» at the Residenztheater.