Danton’s Death

“Danton’s Death”, Georg Büchner’s first theatrical work, was written in 1835 when the playwright was just 21 and being pursued for his revolutionary activities. Although the play was not performed until 1902, Max Reinhardt’s 1916 production would establish it as one of the classic works of the European stage almost a century after its composition. Since Reinhardt, some of the 20th century’s most important directors have tackled the work, from Giorgio Strehler, Jean Vilar and Erwin Piscator to Klaus Michael Grüber and Christoph Marthaler. In Greece, “Danton’s Death” was one of the first works which Fotos Politis chose to stage at the newlyestablished National Theater in a production from 1933 whose lighting and crowd scenes were very much ahead of their time. In Büchner’s play, the theatre becomes the ideal medium for rendering the tragedy of politics. In its short scenes, the combination of political theorizing and rhetoric, cynical political action and, above all, the fickleness of the masses sheds light on the different groups, multiple motives and political judgements that make up the mosaic of the French Revolution during the Terror. Revolutionary theater becomes an unrivalled tool for political thought as it reveals the dialectic of History.