Premiere: Bad Kingdom – Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz | from 11.02.2024

In February 2024, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz will celebrate the premiere of “Bad Kingdom” – the latest play by award-winning director Falk Richter (*1969 in Hamburg).

Fig. above: Exterior view #saytheirnames, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, © Gianmarco Bresadola

Falk Richter’s latest play for the Schaubühne ensemble dares to take stock of the present in fragmented scenes, variations and possibilities of reality. Even the setting is uncertain: is this all a strange nightmare? Are we on a film set, and if so, what strange script is being filmed here? Are we seeing characters in a therapeutic role play? A game? Or is this all supposed to be reality after all? Something is rotten in this “bad kingdom” of the present.

Its inhabitants are insecure people in a big city. They ask themselves how they should deal with the feeling of gradually losing their footing in the midst of ever faster overlapping crises. Are there things worth fighting for? Where are alternative realities, real utopias or simply places where it is possible to retreat from the constant feeling of being overwhelmed?

They look for ways out of their loneliness or shy away from too much closeness. They ask themselves how they can escape the ghosts of the past in the relationships they have or would like to have, the family constellations and the marriages of their parents that have left traces in their thoughts and feelings. They work their way through all the emotional and material legacies bequeathed to them by the generation before them.

Falk Richter was born in Hamburg in 1969 and worked for many years as an author and director at the Schaubühne theatre. Since then, he has directed at numerous German-language and international theatres and was named Director of the Year (Theater heute) in 2018 for his production of “Am Königsweg”. He has been working regularly at the Schaubühne again since the 2023/24 season.

WHERE?

Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz
Kurfürstendamm 153
10709 Berlin

WHEN?

Premiere: Saturday, 11 February 2024, 8 pm.
Further screenings in February and March 2024.