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»Thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing i’ th’ middle. […] Now thou art an O without a figure.«
(Shakespeare, »King Lear«)

In his second work for the Schaubühne, Herbert Fritsch delves into the middle of the story of the world’s self-discovery and opens the mysterious chapter of the zero: »The zero irritates because it marks a nothing where a something could also be. And it fascinates because it signifies this something without being able to define what this something entails. The zero allows us to observe that the world is not determinated and instead is open to procedures of insertion and replacement.« (Dirk Baecker) For too long we have revered the absence with our reception of the zero as nothing and thus cheated ourselves out of the constantly self-renewing and exploratory power and the aesthetic freedom of the zero. Herbert Fritsch and his ensemble discover the zero anew, study in its nothingness the possibility of everything and seek to set themselves against the absence of meaning, without becoming meaning themselves: »I don’t want to break any viewing habits nor tear the mask off the face of the bourgeois. I want to play with the nothingness which passes itself off as something.« (Herbert Fritsch)