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Portuguese company Mala Voadora returns to the TNL with a unique English-language production based on Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan”. Photo credit: José Carlos Duarte 

Launching a season that will pose questions about nationalism, war and violence, capitalism and the past, TNL director Frank Hoffmann compared the work of theatre to that of an archaeologist. It examines the apparently mundane and layer by layer reconstructs the building of memory.

The TNL has always showcased the best in new and experimental drama from Luxembourg and its neighbouring countries, and sometimes from further afield. This season’s English-language highlights are a wild adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” from Portugal and a home-grown multi-media piece written by a Romanian author and starring local dancer Jean-Guillaume Weis.

World premier

“Europe-My Heart Will Not Be Broken”, which has its world premiere at the TNL in early January by Salat Lehal is inspired by Jean Cocteau’s “La voix humaine”. It is centred on a long-distance relationship conducted by telephone between a man, played by Weis, living a comfortable but boring life in Western Europe and a woman, played by Romanian actress Maria Tomoiaga, from Eastern Europe who dreams of becoming an actress.

The “Wilde” piece, by Portuguese company Mala Voadora, almost deconstructs “Lady Windermere’s Fan” as a group of actors and dancers try to make a BBC Radio 7 version of the play their own. With the entire cast, women and men, dressed in ball gowns and waving fans, the show celebrates diversity and blurs the line between the sexes and between good and bad and young and old. “Wilde” is performed on 29 and 30 March 2019.

Watch the teaser for “Wilde”

Teaser for “Wilde” from Mala Voadora on Vimeo

For audiences familiar with French or German, highlights of the season include a biting satire on the war crimes and life after WWI of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Holland, subtitled “The crazy antiwar history rallye”. Then there is Luxembourg based author Claude Frisoni’s three-act farce “Les héros sont fatigants”, Hoffmann’s German language adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “The Gambler” and French adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s comically bitter “The God Of Carnage”, and Anne Simon’s take on Lars Werner’s treatment of the normalisation of extreme right-wing politics “Weisser Raum”.

For the full programme and to book tickets, visit the Théâtre National du Luxembourg at www.tnl.lu.