Empire of Death

(Reich des Todes)
Photo: Thomas Rabsch
by Rainald Goetz
In collaboration with Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus
german
Depot 1
PREMIERE:
30TH OCTOBER 2021
Age recommendation:
16 years and older
Trailer
In its title, Rainald Goetz’ new play bears a quotation from the Creed EMPIRE OF DEATH. The author has descended into this imagined Hades, where he lets his characters report on a rupture in the history of civilisation.

As a writer, Rainald Goetz is a chronicler of the present and the recent past, an author who describes time by transforming it into his »ego time«, as Maxim Biller once called it – into the artistic rendering of what actually happened. In the case of EMPIRE OF DEATH, this is the story of the historical downfall after 11th September 2001. Goetz and his characters from politics, the military, jurisprudence, string-pullers, torturers and the maltreated tell of the turning point, catalysed by the attacks in 2001. They tell of the long shadow cast by the burning World Trade Centre towers in which the surveillance state, state torture and excessive abuse of power ran wild.

A depiction of a break with everything that allegedly constitutes us as a society – thrown into the Goetzian machine of associations and connections which describes, crystal clear, the evil in mankind as a constant across all historical and geographical borders with virtuosity.
director: Stefan Bachmann
Choreography: Sabina Perry
Jean-Mario Bessière
dramaturgy: Beate Heine · Robert Koall
Cast
Leo Henrichs, Jan Felix Rohde, Sven Kaiser, Zuzana Leharová, Naomi Binder, Annette Maye & Bernd Spehl