The System is a working process explicitly aimed at the present, a “work in progress” at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. In this cycle Falk Richter dedicates himself as both writer and director to an investigation of the “question of the system” in terms which are also critical of theatre, society and the media. A “system which attempts to write itself into everything, regarding every country, every culture as no man’s land, an empty white space on the map, a blank page, an empty system which we have to write ourselves into with our notions of freedom, money and democracy” or more explicitly: a “society which is converting itself from civil to military in its visual language and whose economic system is essentially war-like”.

Richter makes it his task to investigate the relationship which people have had since the 11th September 2001 with their own system and comments: “THE SYSTEM is a working process, a play that writes itself during the production process, each evening exists independently for itself, they are all part of questioning The System.” As part of this process – amongst others – the texts Markedly Fewer Casualties, Hotel Palestine and Under Ice were created.