Lotte in Weimar

The house calls it a Goethe-gods comedy after Thomas Mann's novel of the same name, and the description does the book justice: Charlotte Kestner, the original of Werther's Lotte, arrives in Weimar as a widow in her sixties to look at the man who turned her into literature decades earlier. What she finds is a monument with a dinner service. Mann wrote it in exile in 1939, which is the second thing the evening is about — what a German writer does with Goethe when Germany has gone somewhere he cannot follow. Three actors carry it, in the vaults of a house on the market square, in the town where the real meeting took place.