Bad Kingdom

Falk Richter’s latest play for the ensemble of the Schaubühne ventures to take stock of the present in a series of fragmented scenes, variations and possible realities. Even the setting is uncertain: is all this an unsettling nightmare? Are we on a film set, and if so, what strange script is being filmed? Are we watching characters involved in a therapeutic role play? A game? Or is this actually reality after all? Something is rotten in this »bad kingdom« of the present.

Its inhabitants are anxious people in a big city. They are asking themselves how to cope with the sense of gradually losing the ground beneath their feet in the midst of overlapping crises that occur with increasing rapidity. Are there things worth fight­ ing for? Where are the alternative realities, existing utopias or simply places where it is possible to retreat from the constant feeling of being unable to cope? They seek ways out of their loneliness or shy away from too much intimacy. They ask themselves how they can escape the ghosts of the past in the relationships they have or would like to have in the present, escape their family structures and the marriages of their parents that have left their mark on their thoughts and feelings. They buckle under all the emotional and material baggage left to them by the previous generation.

Falk Richter was born in Hamburg in 1969 and worked for many years as a playwright and theatre maker at the Schaubühne. He subsequently directed productions at numerous German­speaking and international theatres and was voted Director of the Year (Theater heute) in 2018 for his production »Am Königsweg«. From the 2023/24 season, he is going to regularly work again at the Schaubühne.