From the throat

*Der KURGAST* is one of the Kurtheater’s most successful in-house productions: thanks to unflagging demand, Hermann Hesse’s long-running hit, starring the incomparable Andreas Storm, is now in
its fifth season!

Hesse’s KURGAST is one of the most amusing works by the Nobel Prize-winning author. The accounts of a spa stay in Baden – Hesse first stayed at the Verenahof in 1923 and returned time and again to our spa town for treatment over the years – are “behind a semi-jocular façade, my most personal and serious book”, Hesse explained immediately after finishing the manuscript. Published in 1925, the narrative ironically depicts the course of his stay in Baden, during which the poet, after initially distancing himself from the other ‘sciatic sufferers’, falls into a state of apathy that he attempts to break through with humour. His despair at his surroundings is heightened, among other things, by the night-time disturbances caused by his neighbour, the ‘Dutchman’: his hatred of ‘his laughter, his good humour, the energy of his movements’ brings home to the poet his own inadequacy and his conflict with the world.

○ “The first-person narrator (…) describes himself as ‘mannered-neurotic’, and Andreas Storm portrays him exactly that way with very subtle facial expressions and gestures. Nevertheless, one grows very fond of him in this brief hour – despite his bad temper and his ranting.” Aargauer Zeitung