In modernity, […] the Irony Monster no longer commits its mayhem in the service of containment or closure. Kleist is its most ardent devotee, and of all the moderns – with the exception, perhaps, of Kafka – the one most attuned to the ancient battle between the Irony Monster and the lesser gods. Kleist, not the German Romantics, is the first to show us the monster’s power unleashed the service of narrative wholeness. Kleist, the theory magnet, tastes of Kant and Fichte, of Spinoza and Hölderlin, of Weltgeist, dialectics, and secularization – but he tastes just as strongly of defiance to any and all of that, of a refusal to let them take over or submit irony to them.

Declining to submit to any conceptual order allows him to practice a literary absolute others only theorized. While there is no Kleistian text that does not worship the Irony Monster, a the monster at its most ferocious, Amphitryon is the most subtle most devious of his works: the play re-maps the relationship of divine and human in the bodily site of Alkmene, where the two quite literally meet. Kleisťs ironic re-arrangement of ancient myth and contemporary reason subjugates all three of its protagonis (Alkmene, Amphitryon, Jupiter) to the Irony Monster, albeit in different ways.

Silke Maria Weineck

DIRECTOR: Botos Bálint
STAGE DESIGN: Jeli Sára Luca
MUSIC: Bocsárdi Magor
SOUND DESIGN: Hodu Péter

Cast:
Rácz Endre, Adorjáni Nagy Zoltán, Barti Lehel András, Lung László Zsolt, Szabó Fruzsina, Pascu Tamara