British director and playwright Anna Furse is the author of over forty performances. Her creativity has been strongly influenced by collaboration with Peter Brook in Paris and her work at the Grotovsky Theatre Laboratory in Poland. At the beginning of the nineteen-eighties she formed a feminist theatre company, Bloodgroup, with which she toured Great Britain and Europe. About her new adaptation of the famous Handke play, in which Kaspar is a woman, and whose english version premiere will be part of our festival, she writes: “This Speech Torture as Handke calls it thus becomes a poetic metaphor for the way in which a society recreates itself through the individual, how the outsider is brought into the values of dominant culture, how we learn to conform, how power works. Our Kaspar is not a feminist heroine, nor a mere victim. She is a survivor. She adapts, or she would probably die. This is not a piece of theatre celebrating women’s emancipation, nor her potential, nor her struggle for power. It is a description of (feminine) powerlessness being drawn into a (masculine) system of power which is unyielding, pitiless and cocksure. The male characters in this production are not pathological or psychotic. They too have learnt the system. And they must pass it on.”
