Ondine

August and Eugenie, an impoverished married couple who live by a lake in the Black Forest found an unusual girl on the river bank after their daughter’s death; they named her Ondine (a small wave). An impulsive, honest, magical water and air creature rides tempests at night and effortlessly performs magical tricks. With her moodiness and unpredictability she causes her foster parents great distress, but with the arrival of a knight in the shining armour everything changes. Ondine falls in love and despite the warnings of her water friends from the depths of the lake decides to get married. Thus a passionate love story begins, in which an ethereal spiritual creature faces petty human altercations and miserable deceptions. The fairy king discretely follows her pains and finally offers her memory loss as the kindest of reliefs.
Giraudoux intelligently wrote a poetic, yet theatrically original text that we could call a grotesque fairy tale for adults. An inventive, joyous yet also melancholy play reveals the seemingly uncommonly earnest strivings of lowly characters and this reflects the author’s view of the absurdity of human existence. Ondine is based on a mediaeval German tale about a knight who falls in love with a water nymph. In it, Giraudoux researches the ebb and flow of human passions and romantic imaginary of the possibility of ideal and permanent love and thematises the split of a human between a free spirit, personified in Ondine and the subjection to social conventions in which as a foreigner the heroine cannot live. This magical play has been forgotten for decades, in France and elsewhere. Perhaps because it is too dreamy, because its metaphors are too ethereal for a confrontation with the violence that surrounds us today, or simply because its original cast is too extensive.
Although the staging will of course be an ensemble one, the cast in the concept of Janusz Kica will be significantly smaller than in the playwright’s vision. Janusz Kica has created a series of exceptional performances in our theatre, among them A Midsummer Night’s Dream (for which he won the Borštnik Award for directing in 2003). Like Ondine or the texts he has directed in other theatres, for example, The Tempest or Peer Gynt, which burst with the magical blending of drama, music, dance and visual theatre elements, Kica knows how to stage them inventively, yet with discipline.