Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten

The 2016 Holland Festival opens with Peter Handke's Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wußten. Produced by Hamburg's Thalia Theater, the Estonian directing duo Tiit Ojasoo and Ene-Liis Semper have set the play in a square in the heart of Europe.

Peter Handke's play is set in an unidentified place, a square in an unnamed country. Despite being sixty pages long, the script has no dialogue. Handke only gives stage directions. We see a random collection of people passing by in a square, hundreds of individuals who come and go, each with their own story, each in their own way adding to the couleur locale and leaving their traces. 

Estonian directing duo Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo staged Handke's play at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg as a snapshot of a central square at the heart of the new Europe. Over the last two decades, Europe and its people have changed dramatically. The abolition of internal border controls within the European Union and digital globalisation have brought Europe closer to other continents. After the two world wars, Europe was confronted with migrants and refugees, new political and religious conflicts within and outside Europe, environmental issues and, central to all this, the burning question of identity. It's this changing world order which inspired Semper and Ojasoo to stage Handke's play, with a cast of twenty actors from the Thalia Theater and an accompanying choir. 

The passers-by who come and go 'write' a communal story of Europe, each adding their own storyline to the bigger picture. People meet up or hurriedly pass each other by, someone falls over, the street is cleaned, someone is in love, someone else is not allowed in, yet another person has their head in the clouds or prays at a wailing wall – people gather at this large central square with their own individual motives. Time elapses, the picture changes frame by frame. The audience is witness to a poetical European utopia, which is as absurdly comical as it is destructive. 'Don't give away what you have seen, stay with the image', Peter Handke wrote in his stage directions. In this way, the viewers can distil from the extremely short scenes the essence for themselves and relate it to their own lives. 

Ojasoo and Semper have been artistic directors of the NO99 Theatre in Tallinn (Estonia) since 2005. Known for their large-scale political theatre productions, they frequently explore recent Estonian history and current world views in their performances. Soon after they started their collaboration, their work attracted attention from outside Estonia and they were invited to various international festivals. In 2011 they staged their first piece at the Thalia Theater during the Lessing Days. After staging two highly political pieces at the Thalia Theater's smallauditorium, Fuck your ego! and Hanumans Reise nach Lolland, they moved to the theatre's main auditorium with Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wußten. 

'This is stage acting in its purest form – dancing, gasping, laughing, crying, without any dialogue,' wrote Spiegel Online. Die Welt concluded: 'The Estonian directing duo Tiit Ojaaso and Ene-Liis Semper unleash a deluge of imagery. (…) The energetic and virtuoso twenty-strong cast gave it their all, gasping for air after two and a half hours of performing. The audience was left breathless as well, be it from sheer amazement.’