Jacob McNeal is a real asshole. An Egomanian star author who learns that he receives the Nobel Prize but has tricked his new novel with AI and a strange manuscript.
Disputed with his son. But also consecrated, as his doctor tells him, and somehow even sympathetic when he wants to find death with the bad news.
“The McNeal case” by Ayad Akhtar is written like a chamber game, a Well-Made Play finest design, premiered last year at the New York Broadway.
The director András Dömönor stages the play at the opening of the season at the German Theater.
It can be put into a row with the pieces “Prima Facie” and “The Dinner”, which he recently brought on stage at the DT. Does this speaks a preference for conversation pieces?
The 47-year-old waves friendly, because it is not that simple. “You think it’s a conversation piece, but it is much more complicated because there are different realities in the piece.”
And in general, his interest never applies to a certain form of theater. “I never like it in the theater if it only goes in one direction and has no ambivalence, or worse if it supports an ideology with all details.”
Playful access is important to him, always the focus with people.
As a director, Dömoss has made a name for himself to break open well -built dialogue fabrics such as recently “Das Dinner” and to explore the conflicts and moral shallows.
He has become more present since Iris Laufenberg’s directorate of Iris Laufenberg at the Deutsches Theater, and he has actually been working in Berlin for a long time.
After studying and directing in Budapest, he only attended the Schaubühne, then worked as a director in Budapest.
He only started staging at the German Theater at 12 years ago and at the parallel at the Maxim Gorki. In Berlin he is artistic, he says.
“Before the situation in Hungary worsened, I was already here. I was able to work here, and the narrow and lack of perspective was spared me. I know that this is a privilege.”
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In Hungary, he awarded productions with prices. On the other hand, he experienced how the Budapest university was trained in 2020 and was completely changed in 2020.
However, he feels that he can still work in both cities as an enrichment. He takes things in both directions.
Last year he staged the novel “His own death” in Hamburg by Péter Nádas, an authors that he was very valued.
Death, but also powerful father-son relationships or totalitarian threats, are topics that concern him very much.
“I always assume what I want to tell personally. This is my access and in ‘the McNeal case’ is of course no different.”
The fact that the freedom endangered by AI is one thing is, but that Jacob McNeal is terminally ill, he also believes that Dömöntör emphasizes.
And so you will experience this Jacob McNeal, played by Ulrich Matthes, how he uses chatt for himself, but the AI refuses to deal with human death.
In addition to Ulrich Matthes, Andri Schenardi, Anja Schneider and Mercy Dorcas Otieno are also present. An ensemble that raves about Dömöntör and that is the focus, even if there will be a lot of live camera and video projections.
Because in Dömöntör’s work there are always different means, open very different levels, anything but smooth, with corners and edges and yet targeted.