King Arthur

Love in Times of War: Even before the legendary British king establishes his famous Round Table, he must liberate Britain from Saxon occupation. Victory for the war-weary Britons seems within reach when Arthur’s adversary Oswald kidnaps the wise, blind Emmeline, Arthur’s great love. A chase through an enchanted, ghost-haunted maze begins. Through a web of illusions, Arthur must fight his way to his final battle with Oswald.

With this successful adaptation of Purcell’s semi-operaKing Arthur by the renowned Upper Austrian author Ewald Palmetshofer, the series of interdisciplinary theater productions at the Tyrolean State Theatercontinues. The new adaptation of King Arthur “follows the plot structure of the original text, but seeks to enrich the cast of characters and their conflicts from a contemporary perspective, to re-emphasize them, and to free them from their historical patina,” according to the author. To this end, Tyrolean composer Kenneth Winkler is undertaking a recomposition of the musical material, in which he reduces Purcell’s music to its quintessence, reimagines it paired with electronic textures, and translates it into a sound engineering setup that enables innovative possibilities for sound design.

At the Tyrolean State Theater, actors, singers, and dancers search together for a way out of the labyrinth that seems to lead people time and again into cruel disputes and violent conflicts. In a play with illusions, reality, myth, and fairy tale flow into one another—poetically and truthfully.