Press reviews

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.