Here you find additional information about the theatre performance «The Notebook» by Forced Entertainment that will be shown at Gessnerallee on Oct 9 - 11.
A Forced Entertainment performance based on the award-winning novel «The Notebook» (1986), by Swiss-Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf.
Who are Forced Entertainment?
Based in Sheffield, Forced Entertainment are a group of artists who have been working together since 1984 producing new works in theatre and performance as well as projects in digital media, video and installation. Led by Artistic Director Tim Etchells, the company continually strives to find new performance and theatre forms with which to describe contemporary urban life. Their work is sometimes challenging but always funny and moving.
http://www.forcedentertainment.com/
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http://www.gessnerallee.ch/programm/search/?q=forced+entertainment#/2148
Thoughts on «The Notebook» by Forced Entertainment's Tim Etchells
Words paint such vivid pictures, and somehow the simpler the better.
Writing The Notebook from the perspective of two children relocated to the countryside during World War Two, the Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf knew very well the potential of a straightforward approach to language. Her twin narrators – the unnamed boys who describe their troubled lives in the countryside as the war drags to its conclusion and the new reality of Hungary as a Russian satellite state takes hold – have a style that’s poised between kids’ picture book and hard-boiled detective fiction....
More: http://www.forcedentertainment.com/notebook-entry/the-notebook-programme-note-by-tim-etchells/
Who was Ágota Kristóf ?
Ágota Kristóf (1935 – 2011) was a Hungarian writer who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French. Kristof received the European prize for French literature for «The Notebook» (1986). Agota Kristof was born in Csikvánd, Hungary in 1935. At the age of 21 she had to leave her country when the Hungarian anti-communist revolution was suppressed by the Soviet military. She, her husband and their 4 month-old daughter escaped to Neuchâtel in Switzerland. After 5 years of loneliness and exile, she quit her work in a factory and left her husband. She started studying French and began to write novels in that language.
In 1986 Kristof’s first novel,«The Notebook» appeared. It was the beginning of a trilogy. The sequel titled «The Proof » was published two years later. The third part was published in 1991 under the title «The Third Lie». The most important themes of this trilogy are war and destruction, love and loneliness, promiscuous, desperate, and attention-seeking sexual encounters, desire and loss, truth and fiction. This novel was translated in more than 30 languages. Beside several more novels she also wrote an autobiographical text, called «L'analphabète» (2004). It explores her love of reading as a young child, and we travel with her to boarding school, over the border to Austria and then to Switzerland. The majority of her works were published by Editions du Seuil in Paris. She died on 27 July 2011 in her Neuchâtel home. Her estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.
As Introduction we show an hour before the show the swiss short-documentary film «Ágota Kristóf - ecrire, aprés tout» (2011) by Sabine Bally, twice in one hour.
literature review by Slavoj Zizek:
There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be: «The Notebook», the first volume of Ágota Kristóf's trilogy, which was followed by «The Proof» and «The Third Lie». When I first heard someone talk about Ágota Kristóf, I thought it was an east European mispronunciation of Agatha Christie; but I soon discovered not only that Ágota is not Agatha, but that Ágota's horror is much more terrifying than Agatha's (…)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/12/agota-kristof-the-notebook-slavoj-zizek