Marburg

The many faces of fear

Marburg is an epic, ambitious and compact play that takes us around the world through a labyrinthine, surprising and captivating structure, while raising ethical dilemmas about power, disease, the instinct for survival and the allure of death. It offers an intelligent look at some of the twentieth century’s light and darkness, and at the fears and hopes that accompanied the arrival of the new millennium. The play premiered at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in 2010 and has been translated into several languages.

In August 1967, a virus unknown to humanity broke out in the picturesque German town of Marburg and caused the sudden deaths of 23 people. Ever since, the name of this town has been permanently associated with its terrible symptoms. This historical event triggers the play’s four stories, each set in a different geographical location sharing the same name: Marburg.

From German Marburg, we jump forward fourteen years to Pennsylvania in 1981, on the day Ronald Reagan is shot by John Hinckley and a conservative bourgeois family loses its only son. We then see South African Marburg on New Year’s Eve 1999, as the millennium is about to change, in a small chapel where an alleged miracle takes place. Finally, we arrive in the present day via Australia, where a meeting between two men at a weather station will change their lives forever.

The concept of disease, present in all these locations, permeates the themes of Guillem Clua’s most ambitious work to date. Marburg reflects on how diseases have defined a particular era in our collective imagination; how they have changed the way we see life, our surroundings and the future; how we react when we feel threatened, when our way of life collapses because of an external element—sometimes microscopic, like a virus—or when we are on the verge of disappearing as a society. Ultimately, Marburg is about the fear of dying, and how that fear has taken different faces and different names over the years.Marburg has unanimously been described as a large-scale work (the staging can easily run to three hours), ambitious and compact.