De Profundis

"Those who want a mask have to wear it. People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself." – O. W.

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison – for being provocative; for loving men, for not hiding his true self and for defying convention. His trial was meant to be a warning to others – less against a crime than against an attitude, against his irrepressible drive for freedom and recognition. His long letter to Alfred "Bosie" Douglas from prison, which became known under the title "De Profundis", is the last outcry of a broken, but untamed spirit; the record of a man who was always looking for the boundaries of his bourgeois life and who in the end lost everything. Wilde writes with the greatest literary mastery about contempt and loneliness, about pride and pain. And about a society that doesn’t tolerate what it doesn’t understand. What remains when everything that a person once was is taken away from them? What can a person hope for when they have nothing left but themselves?      

Director Oliver Reese brings Wilde’s powerfully eloquent attempt to reclaim life through art onto the stage with Jens Harzer, who will make his debut as a member of the ensemble in "De Profundis".