Watch Beware of Pity

Did you enjoy The Encounter? Complicite are back with Beware of Pity. And you can watch it streamed LIVE from the Barbican in London at 15:00 on Sun 12 Feb.

Simon McBurney directs the outstanding Schaubühne ensemble in a vivid account of a young man’s slide into a terrible situation, his struggle to extricate himself from it raising questions of consciousness and compassion.

Young officer Hofmiller commits a faux pas at a soirée held by a Baron, unwittingly asking his paralysed daughter to dance. The mistake pulls him into a relentless train of events in this devastating depiction of honour, love and betrayal, realised against the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – a catalyst for the outbreak of the First World War.

Two of Europe’s most boundary-pushing, imaginative theatre companies work together at the Barbican for the first time. Their co-production is based on Stefan Zweig’s 1939 novel, written just before the Second World War but looking back to the verge of the previous disaster. Reverberating in the past and present, the story is relayed in German by seven actors, swapping narration and dialogue to vocally build the tension of McBurney’s orally rich, visually eloquent production.

Beware of Pity follows the five-star triumphs of The Encounter and The Forbidden Zone, the last shows presented here by Complicite and the Schaubühne respectively.

  • The show is performed in German and will have English surtitles.
  • Running time is 2hrs (no interval)
  • Recommended age 12+

Want to watch the LIVE stream?

Press play on the video above at 15:00 on Sun 12 Feb and the LIVE stream will begin.

We recommend playing the stream at the highest quality. To do this, click on the settings icon at the bottom of the video screen, select ‘quality’ and then select ‘720p’. If however you experience any disruption or lagging in the video, go back to these settings and choose ‘Auto’.

We recommend watching the show with Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as your browser.