MONTBLANC SUPPORTS THE YOUNG DIRECTORS PROJECT

For the ninth time in succession, the MONTBLANC YOUNG DIRECTORS PROJECT took place as part of the Salzburg Festival 2010. The MONTBLANC YOUNG DIRECTORS AWARD is endowed with prize money amounting to €10,000 and the Montblanc Max Reinhardt Pen, which was exclusively designed for this project. 

The theatre project was again sponsored entirely by the International Culture Brand Montblanc. As in previous years, the sale of the Salzburg special edition “Hommage à Max Reinhardt” generated additional sponsorship funds and, once again, allowed a fourth production to be staged.

For this year’s competition, Dr. Thomas Oberender, Artistic Director of the Salzburg Festival, and Martine Dennewald, Curator, selected four young directors and their ensembles from the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany. The nominees were:

The Swedish-born director Jakop Ahlbom, who has worked in the Netherlands for several years, with INNENSCHAU – a theatre thriller, a journey under the surface of the human psyche into a realm of secret wishes and bizarre fantasies which are revealed in layers during the performance to become more and more visible until the audience are left sitting in the dark – swallowed by the unfathomableness of a strange world.

Sylvain Creuzevault and his company d’ores et déjà from Paris with their production NOTRE TERREUR – a play about how the theatre can look at and contemplate the terror of the French Revolution. The play shows the incredible willpower of Robespierre and his fellow members of the revolutionary government in their attempts to reinvent democracy, but also focuses on their desperation at failing in the face of the revolution’s ideals.

Angela Richter from Germany with TOD IN THEBEN, a play written by the Norwegian author Jon Fosse, which comprises the three great tragedies about the rise and fall of King Oedipus, his exile on Colonus and the dire fate of his daughter Antigone in a terse drama of great emotional density. Angela Richter sets this most primeval of family dramas inside a light installation in which the mythical protagonists Oedipus and Antigone appear and make us question our concepts of blame, silence and solitude, and examine what they mean for our contemporary world.

Claude Schmitz from Brussels with MARY MOTHER OF FRANKENSTEIN – a piece about the old dream of creating a human being in our own image. The show presents a living nightmare which narrates the life and works of the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, and also references the incredible pace of biotechnology we are witnessing today.

The Young Directors Award 2010 is unanimously given to Sylvain Creuzevault and his company d’ores et déjà. With NOTRE TERREUR, the jury values in particular the impressive performance of an accomplished ensemble in which the actors are turned into co-directors and the director himself becomes a primus inter pares. The company has made the story of the French Revolution and its implications for the present accessible for youthful enthusiasm; they show the failure of the highest ideals and the dangers of a dictatorship of the virtuous. The company succeeded with sparse means and in direct contact with the audience, through clever use of the space and increasing dramatic force.