Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy

Senior citizens’ theatre SeTA chose a witty and bitterly vicious subject matter for their new stage work: Witold Gombrowicz’s grotesquerie “Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy” puts the life of the outsider into focus, delivering a trenchant dissection of the pace in which normality may become unhinged. The piece from 1935 takes place in an imaginary dolls’ state. Yvonne is an enigmatic, passive girl of neither rank nor position. On a whim, the prince enters into engagement with this oddball – and all the courtiers now have to deal with Yvonne. Her mute, shy presence leads to deep insecurity that quickly turns to maliciousness and hate. So, she becomes a corrosive factor within as well as the victim of a society whose main purpose is to secure its own status quo. A perfidious murder plot is set into motion. The play raises the topical question how we, as a society, deal with misfits. How far does our support reach; how much tolerance remains if integration does not deploy according to our concepts?