The Tin Drum

A child who refuses to grow up. A child whose singing can shatter reality. A child named Oskar Matzerath – narrator, provocateur, witness and accuser of the twentieth century.

This production, adapted by German director and playwright Armin Petras, is based on Günter Grass's most celebrated novel. It brutally and grotesquely depicts the absurdity of history viewed from a different perspective – that of a small and excluded person. The action unfolds in a vanished space where Polish, German, Jewish, Hungarian and other influences meet. On the border of identities and at the edge of languages, it follows the end of an era through the eyes of a man who chose not to grow up.

Who is Oskar really? An ordinary child rebelling against authority? A brilliant outsider? A psychopath? A symbol of a society that prefers to turn to fantasy rather than face its own responsibility? A metaphor? Or simply an ordinary person like anyone else?