Josephine the Singer or The Mouse Folk

Alternative Stage Founding Donor

Major Sponsor of the Greek National Opera

Franz Kafka’s final novel, Josephine the Singer or The Mouse Folk, is adapted into a music theatre performance through a new, ambitious production by the GNO Alternative Stage. The music is created by distinguished composer Kharálampos Goyós, while the direction bears the mark of Savvas Stroumpos, known for his profound theatrical language and the intense physicality of his stage writing.

Franz Kafka’s peculiar and poetic world is imbued with his exceptionally fragile agony over the human condition, which is constantly undermined by an unpredictable and profane sense of humour filled with sarcasm and self-sarcasm. In the short story Josephine the Singer or The Mouse Folk (1924), Kafka transports us to a strange world where there is no youth, not even a brief childhood, as everything is determined by the struggle to survive, and children don’t have the time to be children. In this world, the kind of joy that comes from music never appears; singing has ceased to exist, and whistling is the only form of expression.

Female mouse Josephine, however, introduces an enchanting and captivating type of whistling into this world. Her ecstasy is what makes her whistling irresistible and unique – this odd Kafkaesque singer carries the ecstatic element in the most challenging moments for the mouse folk. Through her bizarre art, she creates a music-like call for revolt, aiming to reclaim life itself.

The performance attempts to shed light on the peculiar, underlying, and sarcastic humour that runs through Kafka’s tragic vision through a musical dramaturgy inspired by the “low”, both carnival-like and, at times, infringing, tradition of light music theatre and vaudeville.