Sydney Festival

Picture the scene …

A space. Empty. A fall of white ash which covers all surfaces, enveloping in a fine whiteness. A party of futuristic explorers trudge through the frozen steppes. They are in the colours of artificial, twenty-first century Antarctic wear – bright red, yellows oranges. they come across a figure, buried in the whiteness, near to death, frozen. It is a girl, dressed in nineteenth-century clothes – sepias, browns, deep greens. They warm her, wrap her in insulative blankets. She begins to stammer out her story, a fantastic tale …

Beware of Pity, the touring co-production of Complicité and Schaubühne, offers a dazzling vision of ethical crisis. Director Simon McBurney’s adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s 1939 novel (Ungeduld des Herzens) compellingly explores the social implications and consequences of individual sentiments without ... 

The protagonist of Thomas Mann's great novel, The Magic Mountain (1924), Hans Castorp, goes into battle, and almost certainly his death, at the end of the book singing 'Der Lindenbaum' from Schubert's song cycle, Winterreise: The song meant a great deal to him, a whole world ... His fate ...