Nico and the Navigators and Puppentheater Halle revolve around Shakespeare’s sonnets at Radialsystem V

Of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, I understood only 4... I bookmarked those in the volume. With all the others I felt like back in the Abitur, when I was supposed to interpret a sonnet and understood nothing. I wrote: The text is incomprehensible, nebulous and bumpy - and got a 6″ for it, sighs a frustrated actor on the stage of the Radialsystem. In their first co-production with the Puppentheater Halle/Saale, the group Nico and the Navigators, known for their innovative productions, attempted an approach to the famous poems, which are among the most difficult works of world literature to translate. How unfathomable some passages are is demonstrated by the actors in one scene, when they place several strongly differing translations next to each other. Thus it remains a gradual approximation and circumnavigation. Native speaker Charles Adrian Gillott recites selected pieces in the original, while his German colleagues or the grouchy old puppet who keeps interjecting, follow up with the translated version. Just when the ensemble gets going and creates the strongest scenes, e.g. the walling up of an actor with blocks torn out of the parquet, with the greatest joy of playing, the entertaining evening is unfortunately already over after 70 minutes.

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