"Die Dinge existieren, solange wir an sie glauben" - Cesare Lievis Kleist-Inszenierungen

Kleist's dramas were not a great success during his lifetime; indeed, they could even appear as unperformable plays, created at best for a theatre of the future. Goethe criticised this "invisible theatre" for its tendency "towards the dialectical", the "stationary process" and the low impact on "eyes and senses". This article aims to show to what extent Cesare Lievi's modern Kleist productions disprove such concerns about the theatrical suitability of Kleist's dramatic texts and actually reveal an astonishing elective affinity between the now renowned "most German" of Italian directors and Kleist. Since founding the "Teatro dell'aqua", Lievi has pursued his very own "idea of theatre", for which space and time become dimensions of the artistic shaping of the experience of freedom on stage. Critical of the usual recourse to the "commedia dell'arte" and pure theatre rhetoric, Lievi tries in his work to bring a "poetica della sospensione" to the stage, in which both the unconscious and the conscious, dream and reality, flow into one another and create, as it were, weightless free spaces of rapture, which at the same time also evoke "spiazzamento" or displacement, a strong irritation and a feeling of uncertainty in the audience. How Lievi also succeeds in this in his three Kleist productions, "Das Käthchen von Heilbronn" / "Caterina di Heilbronn", "La broccca rotta" and "Il principe di Homburg", is illustrated in the article with a detailed description and analysis.