Director:
Arthur Nauzyciel

Translator:
Lado Kralj

Performing:
Helena Peršuh, Milena Zupančič, Vesna Vončina, Urška Taufer, Medea Novak, Arna Hadžialjević

Set designer:
Riccardo Hernandez

Light designer:
Scott Zielinski

Costume designer:
Gaspard Yurkievich

Make-up designer:
Empera

Sound designer:
Beno Gec

Language consultant:
Laura Brataševec

Assistant director:
Juš A. Zidar

Assistant to set designer:
Tine Tribušon

Co-production:
Mini teater, Slovene National Theatre Nova Gorica, City Theatre Ptuj

With the support of Institut français de Slovénie

Premiere in Mini teater:
27th November 2015

Premiere in SNG Nova Gorica:
13th and 14th January 2016

Premiere in MG Ptuj:
8th January 2016

Duration:
95 min

About the performance

Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a play in five acts, shows five episodes from the life of a successful fashion designer. Petra’s friend Sidonie introduces her to a young, 23-year-old Karin, who is on a quest for new life opportunities in Germany. Between Karin and Petra a deep fondness evolves, that grows into a close love relationship. Karin later leaves Petra, which is now for the third time left abandoned and despaired. With the support of her mother and daughter she, at the end, maybe realises that this experience led her to a new fundamental discovery and finding.

It is a play about love and loneliness, about dependance, oppression and search for freedom. Fassbinder wrote the text as a theatre play and staged it in 1971. A year later he shot it into one of his most successful and recognisable movies. Fassbinder, who is determined by endless scandals in his intimate and social life, has created a mirrored image of his own personality in the character of Petra von Kant. Maybe in order to better understand and accept his own life experience - in order to find a new universal truth about a man and his entrapment in the settled thinking patterns.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant directed by Arthur Nauzyciel

In 2015 in Mini teater in coproduction with SNG Nova Gorica and MG Ptuj the theatre play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder will come to life. Theater is a place of endless selfquestioning. Over and over again common patterns and concepts are tested. In search for new solutions, original solutions, questions and answers new ones are arising.  Creators and artists, coming into our space from different environments, are bringing new wievs, new ideas, different concepts and poetics. This way also Slovenian theatre is renewing and enriching itself. For this reason we decided to include in our program a project with an open form that is directed in the research and will result in a theatre performance, stage act.

Rebel with a cause

Rainer Werner von Fassbinder, selfproclaimed enfant terrible of german cinematography was one of rare directors who often found himself on front pages of tabloids. The artist who has in 15 years made more than 40 films and wrote several theatre drama and television texts has in the seventies nevetheless found time to rattle the New York art scene.

In his work  Fassbinder tried to reveal the two-faced German bourgeois society from which he has – also because of his sexual orientation – felt excluded from. He has been called misogynist, accused of treachery and antisemitism, while the critics stigmatised The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as homophobic and hostile to women at the same time.

Fassbinder's Germany

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was without doubt one of the most important authors of the European postwar cinematography. In only 13 years he has made 42 films from which many have become classics (The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fear eats up the soul, The Marriage of Maria Braun and the monumental Berlin Alexanderplatz shot after Döblin's novel). Most studies of Fassbinder focus on his controversial personality and speculates about his personal motives for his extatic productivity.

In the year 1996 (German eddition: 2000) Thomas Elsässer published the first in-depth analitical study of Fassbinder's work in which he emphasized especially the width of caracters and human emotions and the panoramic extent of all social environments and classes. Following he stresses the importance of Fassbinder's works as sensitive, agreeable but nevertheless permanently wild portraits of West German »soul« in the decades when the country was facing old sins of the nazi regime.

Elsässer deals with films from different textual and contextual perspectives by that enabeling un understandable overview of their styles and topics. He lists numerous detailed analysis of certain films, including Despair, Trilogy ZRN, Lili Marleen, In a Year of 13 Moons and Berlin Alexanderplatz. A special chapter haldles also the controversial contributions to the difficult German_Jewish dialogue after Auschwitz.

While presenting the European context for Fassbinder's own facing with fascism Elsässer later on discovers that despite his early death at 37 the director with his unique and moral vision and sense of history tells a lot about the »new« Europe after the year 1989; about its internal walls, divisions and multicultural challenges that it faces.

Thomas Elsässer

About the director

Artur Nauzyciel is one of the most famous French directors touring with his performances all aroud the world. Mini teater, SNG Nova Gorica and MG Ptuj have invited him, his artistic stay and work in Slovenia being the first one in this part of Europe.

After finishing  studying art and film at the Univercity Artur Nauzyciel enrolled at Theatre national de Chaliot lead by the famous Frenc director Antoine Vitez. First he started his carrer as an actor and soon continued as a director of very succesfull plays The Imaginary Invalid after the text of Molière and Happy Days after the text of Beckett in the famous Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe from Paris.

He directed "Heroes Square" by Thomas Bernhard in Comédie-Française (2004); "Ordet" by Kaj Munk at the Festival in Avignon (2005), "Hunger" by Knut Hamsun in Théâtre de la Madeleine (2011),  "The Seagull" by A. P. Čehova (2012) in Pope Palace at the Festival in Avignon.

In the US he directed B-M Koltès' »Black Battles with Dogs« and »Robert Zucco«, "ABIGAIL’S PARTY" by Mike Leigh (2007), Shakespeare's "Julius Cesar". He directed in Dublin, Oslo, Reykjaviko, South America. He is a recepient of numerous French and international awards,  from the year 2007 he is the director of the Centre Dramatique National Orléans..