Falk Richter’s »Welcome to Paradise Lost« is a choral theatre piece that draws on two sources: Farid ud-Din Attar’s medieval Persian Sufi epic »The Conference of the Birds« and the harsh reality of the present day. The result is a polyphonic, restless panorama that blurs the line between poetry and diagnosis.

Richter creates a choir of a thousand voices – humans, birds and the earth itself speak in confusion, changing perspectives and attitudes, sometimes as accusers, sometimes as defendants, sometimes simply at a loss. On the one hand, there is insect mortality caused by agricultural toxins such as glyphosate, the eightfold mowing of meadows, the torn brood of the hoopoe. On the other hand, there are letterbox companies, tax havens and billions in assets flowing unhindered through secret channels, while refugees drown in the Mediterranean and entire regions become impoverished.

As in Attar’s original, the birds decide to convene a large conference and set off together on the long, dangerous journey to the mythical King Simurgh. But first, the play takes us through the whole valley of human excuses and states of exhaustion: overload, indifference, numbness from screens and the constant noise of the global market, which knows growth as its only religion.

The text is sometimes laconic, sometimes angry, occasionally bitterly funny – and always underpinned by the question of why a society that has all the information at its disposal still fails to act. »Welcome to Paradise Lost« is not a play with easy answers, but one with urgent seriousness.

World Premiere: 12/06/21 Staatstheater Kassel