Magda

A play directed by Chela De Ferrari that looks at Magda Goebbels in her final days, in the Berlin bunker of 1945, to explore fear, radicalisation and fanaticism.

The production places Magda Goebbels in the final stretch of Nazism, as the regime collapses around her and the world that gave meaning to her life fades away. The character inhabits both the past and the present, and clings to an ideology that turns rejection of the other into a way of reading reality.

One of the central elements of the staging is her six children, played through puppets of unsettling realism. The puppets are manipulated by immigrant actors who are invisible to the protagonist, which underlines the distance between the discourse she defends and the people who disprove it.

The author and director approaches the play from a desire to understand, not to justify, the mechanisms that led Magda Goebbels to that extreme. It draws a parallel between devastated Europe in 1945 and today's Europe, marked by crises of various kinds.