Two Perspectives

1961. On a trip to Berlin, a West German photographer falls for a nurse from the East. Not long after, the Wall is built. Forced apart by politics, their brief affair grows into something neither can quite let go of… Uwe Johnson’s tale offers a laconic antidote to the mythologizing of love – and history – with its finely-drawn portrait of two incompatible systems and a single fragmented cityscape of isolation and desire.

Exploring the interrelationship between the spoken word and music as a structuring principle, the tale is told by two performers, to an electronic musical score partially created through live, real-time composition.

Two Perspectives is based on the adaptation of Uwe Johnson’s 1965 novel by Andrea Koschwitz and Robert Talheim, translated and directed by Zoë Svendsen
Music composed and performed by Dario Palermo
Costume and print design by Lucille Acevedo Jones
Performed by Lucy Ellison and Finlay Robertson
Stagemanaged by Haidee Carpenter
Produced by Lydia Ziemke

Thanks to: Andrea Koschwitz and the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, Simon Daw, Paul Burgess, Jeremy Hardingham, Miranda Laurence, Leo Mellor and the Judith E Wilson Fund.