Penthesilea

How can you love in a world that revolves around battle? At a time when everything is hardening, when war dominates the news every day and winning seems to matter more than connecting, Kleist's Penthesilea is more urgent than ever. When Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, comes face to face with the Greek hero Achilles on the battlefield, it is love at first sight. But her people live by one law: an Amazon may love only the man she has defeated in battle herself. What follows is an all-consuming collision between desire and power, surrender and violence.

She wants him. Dead or alive.

Date: June 15, 2023 - September 28, 2024
Genre: Theatre
Taal: Dutch
Triggerwarning: This production uses strobe lighting effects.

With Penthesilea, Heinrich von Kleist wrote one of the darkest and most passionate love tragedies ever written. He said of it himself: 'My inmost being is to be found in it, all the filth and all the splendour of my soul.' Director Eline Arbo shows how two lovers are trapped in the world they grew up in: Penthesilea and Achilles try to break free of the roles that war, honour and gender impose on them, only to discover that anyone raised to conquer can barely love any more without destroying. NRC called the production 'a search for vulnerability and freedom in a universe where aggression is never far away'.

In Arbo's energetic, musical style, Kleist's tragedy takes on a raw and sensuous form. ITA's nine actors, with Ilke Paddenburg as Penthesilea and Jesse Mensah as Achilles, play composer Thijs van Vuure's live music themselves. 'In a dynamic piece of direction, the nine-strong cast sparkles from beginning to end', wrote Het Parool. Theaterkrant called the production 'the most vital love tragedy since Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet'.

Director Eline Arbo

'Kleist manages to translate the age-old conflict between man and woman into a moving love story with complex characters. The encounter between Penthesilea and Achilles plunges them both into an existential crisis. She represents a hopeful, new form of love. And yet they do not manage to come together. They underestimate one another, and the consequences are horrific. That makes the play more than a story about the difference between man and woman. It lays bare how we internalise the norms and values of our own culture. Kleist wrote a dramatic play with a tragic ending. But the real tragedy is that in the society in which Penthesilea and Achilles live there is no room for their version of love.'