Socrates

Ironically

Forty years after Julien Schoenaerts, the actor Bruno Vanden Broecke brings the ‘father of Western philosophy’ back to life. Socrates, Plato's teacher and inventor of the Socratic method, got the people on the market square in Athens thinking by ironically asking them provocative questions that undermined their prejudices and beliefs. 2400 years later, the ideas of the ‘Hornet of Athens’ have lost none of their value.

In this new play written and directed by Stefaan Van Brabandt, in the last hours before his death Socrates looks back on his life and ideas: his participation in the Peloponnesian War, his self-imposed poverty, his constantly nagging wife Xanthippe, his love of boys, his quest for the truth, and of course his trial and ultimate sentencing to drink hemlock for blaspheming the gods and corrupting the young.

Socrates is the first in a series of philosopher’s monologues that Stefaan Van Brabandt (formerly with De Koe theatre company, and the author of Het voordeel van de twijfel, a TV series and a book on philosophy) will be writing and directing with De Verwondering. Each monologue will be written as if the philosopher himself were speaking and in a tone and style that matches the attitude and temperament of the philosopher concerned. In the spirit of Socrates, Socrates is therefore an ironic, poignant, tragicomic performance that encourages one to think.

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