It hasn’t been too long since Sydney Festival featured a show by UK company Complicite’s artistic director, Simon McBurney. His five-star production of The Encounter, which landed here in 2017, used an extraordinary three-dimensional sound design to make the one-man show feel like it had a cast of hundreds. Now he’s back with a genuine ensemble piece that uses seven actors from Berlin’s Schaubühne to bring Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s 1939 novel, Beware of Pity, to the stage.
It’s essentially an intimate story about a young Austrian man who becomes entangled with a local nobleman’s daughter, with a tragic outcome. But it has global ramifications, published at the very beginning of World War II, when antisemitism was on the rise. It will be performed in German with English surtitles, but expect plenty of theatrical invention with McBurney at the wheel.
Check out our top 20 picks of the 2019 Sydney Festival program.