The evening seems like a logical continuation, although the differences could hardly be greater. At the end of September, Nico and the Navigators sent Fabian Hinrichs to the Federal Press Conference Centre as the leader of a populist party called ‘Democratic Alliance’ and played out the possible consequences of such a man winning the election. The lie as a tried and tested means of political communication already appeared there in all conceivable manifestations; in ‘The whole Truth about Lies’, an eclectic and ecstatic evening of music theatre, it takes centre stage – with a wide cultural-historical focal range, but always with reference to the present… A clever, multi-layered evening well worth seeing.

Nico and the Navigators once again play a masterful game with the senses. In their new production, they interweave illusion, irony and postmodern narrative art to create a Gesamtkunstwerk that explores the boundaries of deception and truth. Between breathtaking (dance) acrobatics, sound collages and philosophical dialogues, the troupe makes the audience laugh, marvel – and pause for a moment. But where does the pretence end and the lie begin? An unforgettable evening that will captivate the audience and make them think.

The performance collective ‘Nico and the Navigators’ and Fabian Hinrichs present an evening of political tutoring on the dangers of democracy. In the end, it is an ominous distinction on which everything hinges – namely that between ‘political responsibility’, which Arndt claims for himself, and the ‘specialised legal problems’, which he considers to be of secondary importance. This corresponds almost literally to what the leader of the strongest political force in Austria since Sunday is promising: If he comes to power, says Herbert Kickl, he would no longer accept any asylum applications – no matter what the law says.

The premiere of Nicola Hümpel’s production ‘Ein Volksbürger’ last Friday, exactly one day after the AfD used the constituent session of the Thuringian state parliament in Erfurt for a spectacle of contempt for democracy, seems like the apt response of political theatre to such excesses of the theatricalisation of politics. When uninhibited polarisation poisons and overlays the debate and remnants of rational discourse, when parliaments are deliberately disparaged and misused as propaganda platforms, in this production the theatre conversely becomes an instrument of analysis.

The production […] attaches great importance to presenting a realistic scenario […] Nevertheless, the evening also plays with political farce, with Fabian Hinrichs exaggerating and using irony […] A theatre evening that serves political enlightenment rather than art […]

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the Federal Press Conference building in Berlin’s government district will become a stage for the musical theatre collective Nico and the Navigators. And they have a theatre star in tow: Fabian Hinrichs plays a tribune of the people who has long since found his far less amusing counterpart in reality.