Thank you to all who attended our workshop production. Keep posted for what’s next with Casimir and Caroline.
“Nothing’s getting better”
Casimir has lost his job. Caroline wants to have fun. They go to a party, and everything falls apart.
Casimir and Caroline is a play about love in the cold atmosphere of modern capitalism. Its world is full of chronically unfulfilled characters, whether they see themselves as victims, winners, or just living in the moment. They all desperately long for something more. None of them can say what that might be.
But at least their lives look dope on Instagram.
Read the Press Release here..
Read more about take rimbaud here.
Casimir and Caroline
By Ödön von Horváth
Translated, Adapted, and Directed by Holger Syme
Presented by The Howland Company
Featuring: Alexander Crowther, Sophia Fabiilli, Ruth Goodwin, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Cameron Laurie, Michael Man, Jesse Nerenberg, Hallie Seline, Mishka Thébaud, Kristen Zaza.
Lighting Design: Jareth Li
Sound Design: Samuel Sholdice
Stage Manager: Jordana Weiss
Producer: James Graham
Read more about the Cast & Creative Team here.
More about Casimir and Caroline & The Howland Company Workshop:
Ödön von Horváth’s 1932 tragicomedy is one of the most frequently staged plays in the modern German repertoire, but it has never been professionally produced in North America. Veering wildly between raucous and intimate scenes, between destitution and orgies of consumption, between heartbreak and vicious satire, between hilarity and anger, Horváth’s play could have been written yesterday. Its political analysis remains astonishingly up-to-date.
“We took our cue from Horváth’s insistence that the play takes place ‘now.’ We set the action in our world, at a corporate party inside a nightclub, among the shallow and overly thoughtful, the eager and disillusioned, the over-privileged and desperate twentysomethings of contemporary Toronto. Aesthetically, our staging is indebted to Horváth’s own commitment to theatricality: as he wrote, “naturalism and realism would kill my plays.” In the past three months we’ve been striving to blend European and Canadian stage sensibilities. In this exploration we are looking to find a contemporary theatre language to approximate Horváth’s distanced but faithful, unflinching but sympathetic portrayal of ‘people as they are.’”
– Holger Syme, Adaptor & Director
This four-day run is conceived as a workshop production, reflecting the results of an intensive and extended rehearsal process. It is being presented as a fully staged production, a preliminary end point of the company’s process; the anticipated future development of the project will focus on the production as a whole rather than solely on the text. Audience feedback and commentary will be actively solicited during talkback sessions after each of the four performances.
Casimir and Caroline is part of the 2015/16 season of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. It is produced with support from the Jackman Humanities Institute’s Program for the Arts.
About Ödön von Horváth
Horváth, born in Croatia in 1901, grew up in Hungary and worked as a dramatist and novelist in Germany from 1920 through 1933. He left Nazi Germany for Vienna in 1933, and emigrated to France after the German takeover of Austria in 1938. He died shortly after relocating to Paris, when a tree branch fell on his head on the Champs-Élysées. Horváth’s major plays include Tales from the Vienna Woods and Judgment Day as well as Casimir and Caroline; his oeuvre was rediscovered in 1960s Germany, eclipsing Brecht’s presence in the repertoire for many years, and has remained a staple of German theatre seasons. Tales from the Vienna Woods has twice been staged with great success at the UK’s National Theatre, in 1977 and 2003; Casimir and Caroline had its first professional production in English earlier this year in Manchester (as Funfair), in a translation by Simon Stephens.
About Holger Syme
Holger Syme is the chair of the Department of English and Drama on the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. As a researcher and teacher, he specializes in Shakespeare and contemporary European theatre, and frequently blogs at dispositio.net. As a director, he has worked on a dozen short films and stagings of plays ranging from Büchner’s Woyzeck to Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.
The Howland Company 