AMOK/Fewer Emergencies

To produce “Amok”, Falk Richter has staged six short texts by Martin Crimp. They centre around two of the author’s mini dramas; this is their German-language premiere. Weniger Notfälle and Gesicht zur Wand make an experimental attempt to reconstruct a deed, its perpetrators and its victims. Martin Crimp dissects the anatomy of our civilisation by means of its total negation; an isolated, explosive and unpredictable excess of violence. But the ultimately inexplicable phenomenon of running amok develops into a metaphor of the West, which had already begun to see and arrange itself in a permanent, exceptional state of siege before the 11th September.

“In Crimp’s plays the horror is blind. This would be banal, merely sensation-seeking cynicism if it were not for the extreme coolness of the language, the reduction to a very few images and snapshots, which create an eerie distance to the action. Falk Richter’s production finds some frighteningly sober scenes for this cool horror. The destruction and self-destruction of western civilisation is not a brightly-coloured cinema spectacle or a reason to be shrilly pathetic, but a sadly acknowledged inevitability. The actors Jule Böwe, Cristin König, Ronald Kukulies, Linda Olsansky, and above all the impressive André Szymanski, successfully set moments of deep disturbance into this coldness, remaining quite free of pathos.”
(Peter Laudenbach, Tagesspiegel)