Wallenstein Election Campaign

Loyalty, love, power, fraud, war. Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel from the theater group Rimini Protokoll search in their field study relating to Schiller’s piece “Wallenstein” the timeless conflicts behind the text, and try to adopt Schiller to the present. Initially, in the year 2005, a documentary theater production is created, which doesn’t use real actors, but normal people playing themselves. “Specialist from every day life” from Mannheim and Weimar oppose Schiller’s Wallenstein-protagonists with their own biographies. Ten humans from two cities, who belonged to the opposite ideological blocks on both sides of the iron curtain: Experts for the rise and fall in the political game around power, loyalty and obedience or the individual in rapid political transition periods. For their concept of the “Antia-Drama-Theatre” Haug, Kaegia and Wetzel aka “Rimini-Protokoll” achieved the Special Award of the German Theater Award “Der Faust” in November 2007, in April 2008 they recieved the European Theater Award in the category “New Realities”. With their Wallenstein-Production they visited the “Berliner Theatertreffen”, the “Zürcher Festspiele”, the “Hamburger Autorentheater-Tage” and the “Festival Mettre en Scène in Rennes” in France. And now Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel have re-staged their “Wallenstein” with their “experts of reality” for the camera. With the means of theater an extraordinary documentary succeeded which makes “Wallenstein” in an associative transfer a force field outside of the theater. This theater-documentary is, with its quasi living protocols, is very close to reality because the protagonists are authentical as they are themselves, but they are also a little bit Wallenstein’s Piccolominis and countess Terzkys of the real world: devoted traitors, manipulators, and victims of intrigues.