Before Dawn
(Vor Sonnenaufgang)

A new day and the light of the rising sun still promise hope for the future. But in the bleak world in which the Krause family are awaiting the birth of a baby, people are alone and rootless. New love flickers to life and is extinguished; two university friends meet again after many years and realise they are now separated by an unbridgeable gulf and conflicting ideologies.
 
Before Dawn: alone the name of Gerhart Hauptmann’s first play, which premiered in 1889, suggests a transitory situation, a liminal state. In his reworking of the play, the Austrian playwright Ewald Palmetshofer dissects the fractures in our society, and through the story of a family and its conflicts brings to light wider social issues and connections. The play is less about determinacy in the sense of genetic inevitability, than about how much our pasts, our roots and experiences are embedded in the here-and-now of human existence and in political practice. Through a seemingly simple story and a mundane depiction of everyday life, the lucid text develops its tragic momentum.