The Sorrows of Young Werther

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

17 - 20 October, 2012 *Matinee Oct.20

Adapted and directed by Fannina Waubert de Puiseau
Frederic Wood Theatre
Theatre at UBC
University of British Columbia
Vancouver CANADA

Share this page

 

Twitter

Subscribing to our season is the best way to save

5 Plays for $90?! Save on our already low single ticket prices! Regular $90/Senior $70/Student $40

click here Visit our Season Subscription page

Explore Theatre at UBC's season

click here Visit our Season page

— On the Subject

World Premiere: Theatre at UBC brings an exciting and thoroughly modern re-visioning of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s classic Romantic novel to the stage. The first great ‘confessional’ novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) is loosely autobiographical and draws on Goethe’s own unrequited love for a married woman. His sensitive exploration of the mind of a young artist brought immediate success to the story and made Goethe one of the world’s first literary stars. The book’s many passionate devotees included Napoleon, and it sparked a phenomenon known as "Werther Fever", which caused young men throughout Europe to dress in the clothing style described for Werther in the novel. It reputedly also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide.

director and actor in rehearsal
Director Fannina Waubert de Puiseau, Bottom: Ryan Beil. Photo: Tim Matheson

Director and UBC Theatre alumna Fannina Waubert de Puiseau has worked as a theatre artist in Germany and Canada for almost a decade. She is currently Literary Assistant at the Arts Club Theatre and freelances as a dramaturg and language editor. Recent theatre credits include production dramaturgy for Master Class, Clybourne Park, and The Importance of Being Earnest at the Arts Club, a co-adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler with Bob Frazer for Osimous Theatre, and a directing apprenticeship on The Merchant of Venice at Bard on the Beach. Fannina is an MA student in the Dept. of English at UBC, and a member of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas.

Ryan Beil
Ryan Beil stars in The Sorrows of Young Werther. Photo: Tim Matheson

The Sorrows of Young Werther stars Jessie Award winning actor, and BFA Acting alumnus, Ryan Beil. Beil’s credits include White Rabbit, Red Rabbit (Volcano and Necessary Angel Toronto & Wolfgang Hoffman, Berlin), Comedy of Errors (Bard on the Beach), Billy Bishop Goes to War and The Importance of Being Earnest (Arts Club), American Buffalo (for Beil’s own company, Main Street Theatre Co.) and an improvised one-act play Skin and Lungs (The Globe Theatre). Beil’s improv career has sent him to perform across Canada, internationally as well as locally with his own troupe The Sunday Service, recent winner of the 2012 Canadian Comedy Award for Best Improv, and Vancouver TheatreSports.

The Sorrows of Young Werther features a cameo performance by recent BFA acting graduate Melanie Reich. The creative team includes BA Double Honours (English & Theatre) student Tanya Mathivanan (Assistant Director), MFA design student Matthew Norman (Lighting and Media Design), BFA Design students Molly Lai (Set Design), Cat Robinson (Costume Design) and Masters of Library and Information Studies student Christopher Rhys Pugh (Sound Design) with BFA Production student Erica Leduc (Stage Management).

THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER October 17 – 20, 2012 | Frederic Wood Theatre, 6354 Crescent Rd., UBC MAP: http://bit.ly/94dLm6 | CURTAIN: Nightly at 7:30 p.m. & Matinee Oct. 20 @ 2 p.m. | TICKETS: Reg. $22/Senior $15/Student $10 + service charges | $7 Preview Oct. 16| Talk Back: Thur. Oct. 18| BOX OFFICE: 604.822.2678 or box.office@ubc.ca Online: http://ubctheatre.universitytickets.com | MORE: www.theatre.ubc.ca

Ryan Beil
Ryan Beil. Photography by Kin Chan. Styling by Mila Franovic.

 

Montecristo Magazine interviews Ryan Beil

Alumnus Ryan Beil  was interviewed recently by Katie Nanton for the Globe and Mail supplement Montecristo Magazine. He talks about his career and some upcoming projects he’s excited about, includingThe Sorrows of Young Werther. Beil appears at the Vancouver International Improv Festival upcoming in late-October, and a few theatre stints are on the horizon, including a production of David Sedaris’s SantaLand Diaries with the Arts Club Theatre. Read the full article here: montecristomagazine.com

(Ryan Beil is) A burger boy,
a murdered youth, an everyman, a tortured lover?
Check.” - 
Katie Nanton, Montecristo Magazine

The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Background ~ compiled by Tanya Mathivanan

Foundations of Romanticism:

Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement which originated in Europe in the 18th century and carried over into the 19th century. It began as a movement against industrialization and the 17th century Enlightenment movement.

Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature - emotion over reason and senses over intellect. Followers of the movement, referred to as Romanticists, regarded beauty as synonymous with feeling, and it’s motive force the longing that can only find satisfaction in the chaos of unreality. The movement’s symbol was the blue flower, the colour illustrative of the boundless sky.

The Romanticists returned to the Catholic ideal of mystic absorption in the Deity, and their motto was the medieval ‘memento mori’, for death was the gate to the real life of the spirit”. Romanticism has a close relationship to Sturn und Drang movement.

Romanticism in Literature:

Romanticism in Literature generally coincides with the rise of national consciousness in many European counties and with the gradual diminution or abrupt, revolutionary destruction of feudal power..

Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, became an early influence for later Romantic pieces of literature. Romanticism is concerned with the individual more than with society. The individual consciousness and especially the individual imagination are especially fascinating for the Romantics.

The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, active, rather than a passive power. It which views imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art

Romanticism in Visual Art:

Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

Romanticism in Visual Art flourished during the early 19 century. Romantic artists were fascinated by the nature, the genius, their passions and inner struggles, their moods, mental potentials and heroic figures.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought.

The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of the tradition of Neoclassical history painting, in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. The Romantic artist had a role of an ultimate egoistic creator, with the spirit above strict formal rules and traditional procedures. He had imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth.

Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th century German Romantic Artist, and was regarded as one of the most important and influential artists of his time.

His painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, is one of the most well-known Romantic Paintings.

Romanticism in Germany

The Romantic Movement in Germany was quite different from the one that developed in England.  The evolution of Romanticism in Germany can be seen as part of a continuum of development in European intellectual history that also included more narrowly confined literary movements in Germany such as the Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classicism.

In contrast with the much more serious English Romanticism, German Romanticism contained, and appreciated, humour and wit, in addition to beauty. The Romantic Movement in Germany also included music. Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner were two such composers that were highly influential to the Romanticism.

Beethoven in particular embodies the Romantic ideal of a tragic artist that defied all odds to conquer his own fate. Wagner’s philosophy of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) was roughly in line with the German Romantic desire for a synthesis of the arts.

The Sturm und Drang Movement

The Sturm und Drang movement, which can be translated as storm and stress,, and it preceded the Romantic movement which took place in the mid-18th century.

The Sturm und Drang Movement placed emphasis on individual subjectivity, free expression to extremes of emotion, and particularly rebelled against the social constraints put in place by the Enlightenment era. The Sorrows of Young Werther is a notable example of this.

Other works include Goethe’s poem Prometheus, and Schiller’s play Fiesco.

It is a movement that seems most closely related to the Romantic movement. Through Sturm und Drang, as well as through Romanticism, an intellectual tendency and certain spiritual attitude, which for thousands of years had largely determined the thoughts and feelings of humanity, gained dominance in German poetry Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang), sought to disrupt all forms, negating the unities of time, place and action in drama, rebelling against the normative aesthetics, and stressing immediate affects over enduring values In general, the Sturm und Drang, with its emphasis on spontaneity and imagination, its adulation of the rebelious genius, and its disregard for religious icons, served as a model for the Early Romantic generation in their rejection of fixed orders and structures.

It was amid the revolutionary times of ‘storm and stress’ that German Romanticism was born.

Goethe

There is much debate as to whether Goethe himself was a Classicist or Romanticist. His works were not confined to a single literary moment, and he evolved quite a bit of the course of his literary career. 

He never actually considered himself a Romanticist and called the movement “sick” much later on in life

Goethe started off in the Sturm und Drang movement (the earliest form of the Romantic movement), before turning to “Weimar Classicism” and also published works of a scientific nature.

Goethe had an emotional affair with an older, married woman called Charlotte Buff in his youth. His experiences with her formed the basis for writing The Sorrows of Young Werther when he was 24.

The Sorrows of Young Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther is a novel, written during the Sturm und Drang period. It is considered to be the spark that ignited the Romantic Movement in Germany, and became quite famous worldwide.

Love Letters
An epistolary novel

Goethe wrote this novel as a series of letters a literary style which is referred to as epistolary. The epistolary novel was a very common form in Goethe’s time as letters were the primary mode of communication. The book was loosely based on his obsessive, 10-year intimate relationship with Charlotte Buff. The character of Albert was modelled her fiancé Johann Christian Kestner. Another influence was an actual suicide, that of Goethe’s friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem at Wetzlar in October 1772. Jerusalem had fallen in love with a married woman and fell into a deep depression because of this. Goethe wrote in his memoirs, My Life: Poetry and Truth: “Suddenly I heard of Jerusalem’s death and hot upon the general rumours, an exact and involved description of the entire incident. In that moment the plan of Werther was found, the whole thing was crystallised, like water in a glass that is on the point of freezing and can be turned to ice immediately with the slightest motion.”

Goethe said that he breathed into the words all the passion that results when there is no difference between fact and fiction It was quite a controversial novel when it was first published as it seemed to glorify suicide, which is a sin as viewed by the church. The novel was (and still is) famous for its themes of defiance against authority and social conventions, a call for the natural authenticity of the artist, a revel in the genius of the artist, unrequited passion as the purest form of love, and the desire for a sense of joy that is beyond grasp. These are the themes and viewpoints adopted by the Romantics, and turned into a form of ideology.

Goethe’s controversial novel almost immediately became a sensation, and turned the relatively unknown author into a overnight success. A new fashion trend emerged of men dressing in yellow pants and blue jackets, just as Werther’s clothing  was described. The novel also famously led to some copycat suicides, which were later known as the ‘Werther effect’. Readers, especially the young, adopted it as the triumphant standard of the entire Romantic movement.

It was also hated as passionately as it was praised. The German clergy viewed it as a distinct threat because of its questionable morality and sympathetically presented suicide. Classic scholars berated the author for his uncontrolled romantic excess. But no amount of institutional criticism could dampen the rapture with which the young responded to Werther.

Goethe distanced himself from the novel when he was older. The fame of this novel had overshadowed all his later works, and had also made his affair with Charlotte public knowledge. He also distanced and in a way, renounced the Romantic Movement for its sensibilities.

How often I have cursed those stupid pages
That exposed my youthful suffering to the masses”

In the fourth of his Roman Elegies, written in 1788–1789, in a suppressed draft, Goethe gives thanks that he has escaped from the endless interrogation about his famous work. “How often I have cursed those stupid pages/That exposed my youthful suffering to the masses,” he writes. “Even if Werther had been my brother and I had killed him,/It could not be worse than this: being vengefully pursued by his sad ghost.”

Postscript

The history of Werther and his beloved Lotte comes to an end with Werther’s death on Christmas Day, 1772. But the story of Goethe and his model Charlotte Buff had yet a while to run. In 1816 Charlotte, then a widow of sixty-three, visited Goethe’s home town of Weimar and contacted him. After their meeting she wrote to her son: “I have made the acquaintance of an old man, who, if I had not known it was Goethe, and even then, made no very pleasing impression on me.” Coming across this sour remark, Thomas Mann made a note: “I believe this anecdote could form the basis…of a novel.”

In 1939 Mann published Lotte in Weimar, in which he dramatizes the 1816 encounter, bringing together the couple who, inextricably confused as they are in the national imagination with their fictional avatars, belong by now to the realm of myth. Goethe is as ungracious as can be (“Why could not the old woman have spared me this?”). Reluctantly he invites Charlotte and her daughter to his grand home, then pays more attention to the daughter than to her. Observing that she suffers from a tremor, he shuts his eyes fastidiously. For her part, Charlotte recalls why she turned Goethe down in the old days: because he seemed “inhuman, without purpose or poise.”

~ Background compiled by Tanya Mathivanan

 

 

 


a place of mind, The University of British Columbia

DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE & FILM

THEATRE AT UBC
6354 Crescent Road Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Tel: 604.822.3880 | Fax: 604.822.5985
E-mail: thtr.sec@ubc.ca