Rage

(WUT)
Photo: Judith Buss
by Elfriede Jelinek
Depot 1
PREMIERE:
25 SEP 2020
Trailer
What is the human being like in extreme situations? Does it hoard, plunder or share? Does it, first of all, think about itself or is there more to the man than we think?
Crises like the current one, triggered by the Corona virus, are the crash-test. The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, for example, is a philanthropist. He is convinced that human beings are basically good, showing solidarity, acting cooperatively, and he finds a lot of evidence for this. That gives raise to hope! The American cultural philosopher and mastermind of the Occupy movement Charles Eisenstein hopes, too, that with regards to the Corona crisis, we will become »the rulers of that which had ruled us«.

Elfriede Jelinek, however, is less confident about this so far. Inspired by the ancient myth of the goddess Hera, who made the hero Heracles be blind with rage, resulting in him killing his children in a state of intoxication, the Austrian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature looks neither optimistically into the future nor into the past. In alternating perspectives, she tells about the rage of Islamist terrorists, about attacks on the Paris newspaper editorial office and the Jewish supermarket, as well as about German enraged citizens, angry gods, fathers and sons. But there is one thing they all, Bregman, Eisenstein, Jelinek, agree on: What will become of us lies in our hand.

direction & stage design: Ersan Mondtag
stage assistant: Simon Lesemann
stage lighting: Rainer Casper
dramaturgy: Beate Heine