Anna Karenina...

Directing partners Clemens Sienknecht and Barbara Bürk have made a name for themselves in recent years with their engaging and highly entertaining 'Verfremdungstheater'. Their recent series of shows devoted to the greatest literary heroines of the 19th century

has become a huge success. Last year’s Effi Briest –allerdings mit anderem Text und auch anderer Melodie (although with a different text and a different melody, 2015) received an enthusiastic reception when it was performed in the Netherlands. The NRC Handelsblad described it as, 'one hundred delightful minutes of high-voltage comedy'. Now the duo, both members of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, is back with Anna Karenina – although with a different text and a different melody. Same sort of story, but indeed, with completely different words and music. 

Once again, audiences will enjoy a live-radio broadcast produced on stage, this time devoted exclusively to Lev Tolstoy's heroine, Anna Karenina. Radio Karenina inimitably combines a radio play, a literary narrative, bizarre jingles, pop music from the 1970s and 80s, and eye-catching costumes, all with an added layer of irony and an infallible instinct for intelligent meta-literary theatre.

A very brief synopsis of the great novel: the married Anna Karenina falls hopelessly in love with the wealthy bachelor Count Alexei Vronsky, and she realises she no longer loves her husband. All this is surrounded by a cast of supporting characters suffering from their own amorous tribulations.

Radio Karenina lovingly pokes fun at Tolstoy's 19th-century realism and the story’s complexities. At the same time, the play is Sienknecht and Bürk's tribute not only to a legendary literary character who has fascinated audiences for 140 years, but also to the timeless pop music of the seventies. This Anna Karenina’s adulterously swinging soundtrack contains numbers from the likes of Grandmaster Flash, Pink Floyd, and Michael Jackson, because nothing is better for dancing than forbidden love.