HOSPITAL OF THE SPIRITS

About the show

In Copenhagen's Imperial Hospital, known as ‘The Empire’, doctors use state-of-the-art technology to fight disease and death in the service of science. However, this is certainly on shaky ground, as the hospital was built on marshland: ‘Perhaps they became too presumptuous in their stubborn denial of the spiritual world? For in the building, so modern and seemingly so solid, cracks of fatigue are becoming visible. The gates to the realm of death are beginning to open again.’ These are the opening credits of the series, which the young Lars von Trier created for Danish television after completing his studies. With black humour, the events in ‘Reich’ raise fundamental questions that, in all their absurd scurrility, go to the heart of the healthcare system: What is the state of hospitals? What about efficiency and ethical and moral issues in relation to medical practice? But also: To what extent is the past part of the present? To what extent is evil a prerequisite for good? And above all: how permeable is the boundary between life and death? Lars von Trier, great European filmmaker and enfant terrible of the film industry, is a cult director whose films are as provocative in content as they are aesthetically innovative. Many of his works have been adapted for the theatre, and ‘Hospital of the Spirits’ is now finding its way onto the stage - near the Charité, which was also built on unstable ground - as a spectacle full of characters that is also an inclusive theatre project with players from RambaZamba and Graz.