THE CONDACTOR

Ronald Harwood

Translated by Guram Ghonghadze

Stage Director and scenographer | Levan Tsuladze

Costume designer | Nino Surguladze

Choreographer | Tinatin Tsuladze

Music adaptation | Zurab Gagloshvili

Video installation | Data Dvalishvili

Assistant to director | Tamar Pruidze

 

Characters:

Debora Arnold | Manana Kozakova

Doctor Furtwängler | Levan Berikashvili

David Wills | Koko Roinishvili

Emma Straube | Sopio Zeragia

Ulrike Rode | Ketevan Tskhakaia

Barbara Sachs | Tamar Bukhnikashvili

Colonel Volkov | Duta Skhirtladze

Duration: 120 minutes, with one intermission 

In case of tour: 14 persons 

 

Genre - drama based on real story 

It’s 1946 and Wilhelm Furtwängler, chief conductor of the Berlin State Orchestra, is put to 

trial in Nuremberg. Debora Arnold, officer of USA Army, tries to investigate the past of the 

famous German conductor Doctor Furtwängler.The interrogation room becomes a battlefield 

of different ideologies: can you separate art and politics? Can one lead a life of peace and 

productivity after striking a deal with the devil? Does music hold the potential to free the 

human spirit? This arresting play by Ronald Harwood rises these many important questions , 

still urgent nowadays, yet the answers may prove challenging to confront.

 

Review 

Levan Tsuladze's first season in the new independent theater was "marked" with 6 performances of different 

material, different themes, dramaturgy and different forms .

Among these six, "The Conductor" (based on Ronald Harwood's play Taking Sides) stands out - about the 

ongoing processes in post-Nazi Germany and the trial of one of the world's best conductors, Wilhelm 

Furtwängler. 

The director's goal, in a play assembled and skilfully mounted with various artistic techniques (main action line, 

character portraits, installation, projection, chronicle, theater and cinema methods that skillfully and organically 

change and complement each other) - is a person's moral responsibility and choice between mediocrity, 

conformism and resistance of tregime. The atmosphere, which is a clear expression of the modern situation, 

the sequence of events, the position of the director, becomes the result of the structure of the performance, the 

construction, the conceptual and artistic understanding of the layers, the synthesis of all creative components.

Levan Tsuladze, together with a team of actors with well-chosen types and artistic skills, puts the fate of a 

person at stake and makes the audience a participant in the trial, a decision-maker, but without interfering in the 

process. Instead, it reflects on personal choices. Moral responsibility lies beyond the judgment of the tribunal.

Sometimes devotion to great art loses its original value and becomes a refuge or a means of self-righteousness.

But one day "the court will definitely come" and everyone will have to answer for their personal choices - both 

righteous and unrighteous.

Lela Ochiauri, Theatre Critic