"Die Blechtrommel" Nico Holonics

Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum)

by Günter Grass
Bertolt-Brecht-Platz 1
10117 Berlin
Contact & Access

Box-Office

+49 30 284 08 155
theaterkasse@berliner-ensemble.de

Der reguläre Vorverkauf für alle Vorstellungen bis 2. Dezember 2024 startet am 4. Oktober um 10 Uhr. Unsere Theaterkasse hat montags bis samstags von 10.00 Uhr bis 18.30 Uhr für Sie geöffnet.

    • theaterday

    sold out

    Join the waiting list

    Remaining tickets possibly at the box office

  • with English surtitles

Oskar Matzerath has barely been born when he recognises the world to be a universal disaster – and rejects it entirely. Because the world he is tossed into, 1924 Danzig, is the dawn of the National Socialist regime. A world that provides scant opportunities for a growing boy to thrive. Only when his mother promises to give him a tin drum, an acceptable prospect for survival unfolds: the life of a drummer, the grotesque existence of an artist with all its ambivalence of motivation and consequences. And so, on his third birthday, Oskar decides to reject this world, to stop growing and to become an observer, a drummer. From his frog’s eye view, he describes the emergence of fascist thought and action, reports on adultery and Pogrom Night, links private stories with the history of the Third Reich. He is a witness and an outsider, a prosecutor and a participant in a world where a rupture in civilisation like the Holocaust is possible, and thus he poses the question of personal responsibility in an utterly dark world. 

All his life, Günter Grass felt responsible for the horrors committed in the name of Germany. “Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum)” is an attempt to render transparent the mechanisms of his own seduction by nationalist and fascist ideologies and to sound a drum of dissent. Regardless of all controversy surrounding both the novel and its author, Nobel Prize laureate Günter Grass, the text is still regarded as a milestone of German post-war literature today. Director Oliver Reese tells the story of the eternal drummer in a version tailored entirely to the protagonist’s point of view.

A production by Schauspiel Frankfurt

We regularly present performances of "The Tin Drum" with English surtitles. You can find the dates here. Our box office staff will be happy to tell you from which seats you will have a good sight-line to the surtitles. For the best view of both stage and surtitles, we recommend seats in the stalls (Parkett) from row 11, or in the balconies (1. Rang, 2. Rang). Seats in the side boxes have a partially obstructed view.

Digitales Magazin

Press

“A triumph of acting!”Frankfurter Rundschau

“A virtuoso Oskar-solo show by the exceptional actor Nico Holonics.”Berliner Zeitung

“You find yourself unequivocally rooting for the actor with his whining and brooding, his seductive whispers and megalomaniac screams.”Süddeutsche Zeitung

“In a dramatic tightrope-act between identifying and distance, oppressive mania for realisation and subtle suggestion, Nico Holonics succeeds in portraying the development from rebellious infant and whining brat to insidious strategist in one single breath.”Deutschlandfunk

Guest Performance

16.04.2018 Madách International Theatre Meeting (MITEM), Budapest

25.09.2018 Theater Gütersloh, Gütersloh