About the work
“Merlin oder Das wüste Land” (Merlin or The Waste Land) is a play by Tankred Dorst, written between 1978 and 1980 in collaboration with Ursula Ehler. The vast work based on the legends of King Arthur consists of five parts with 97 short scenes and mixes dialogue, songs, letters and prose as well as passages in Latin, Italian and French. It premiered on 24 October 1981 at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, directed by Jaroslav Chundela.
Plot
Merlin, the son of the devil, persuades the young Arthur to build a kingdom of justice, symbolised by the Round Table. Yet the ideal falls apart: Queen Ginevra loves Lancelot, Mordred plots revenge, and in the battle between father and son Mordred is killed and Arthur mortally wounded and carried to Avalon. Merlin himself ends up caught in the spell of the fairy Viviane, while anachronisms such as Mark Twain at the Round Table keep pulling the legend into the present.
Cultural significance
Dorst described the play as a drama about the failure of utopias; critics also read it as a reflection of the generational conflict in West Germany in the 1970s. It is among his most frequently staged works in German-speaking theatres, with productions for instance at the Münchner Kammerspiele (1982), the Thalia Theater Hamburg (2011) and the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar (2012).