Der Riss durch die Welt (The world ripped apart)

An industrialist in the satellite business/art collector and his wife/former assistant, a young artist/second generation immigrant and her assistant/lover. A weekend in a villa far away from the city – and the mobile phone network: the view is stunning, the drinks are plentiful, the conversation is … tough. In a series of snapshots the characters including Maria the housekeeper reconstruct the entire weekend they have spent together – and its crises.

«But you’ve got to admit, the location is perfect, you couldn’t think of a better place to imagine the end of the world.»

The play’s starting point is the ten plagues of the Old Testament – visions of streams of blood, plagues of locusts and still births – that haunt the characters’ conversations and imaginations. Whatever the cause of the evident disaster in the glaring incompatibility of the participants’ lifestyles – whether it is the stuff of their secret dreams/nightmares or result of the state the world is currently in – remains obscured in between all the wine glasses and oyster shells. Because what do this billionaire couple and their guests from the avantgarde urban underclass actually have to talk about apart from bankrolling the next exhibition? While none of the participants believes in a God who intervenes to punish human beings, Biblical natural disasters, on the other hand, seem a much less unlikely scenario. Schimmelpfennig probes whether the five people present might possibly be capable of achieving some kind of workable solidarity in the face of looming misfortune. 

Roland Schimmelpfennig began his theatrical career in Munich and is now one of the most frequently performed playwrights in the German language. The director Tilmann Köhler is renowned for his lucid and uncomplicated work in both theatre and opera and makes his debut in Munich with «The World Ripped Apart».