The physicists

Venue: DT Stage - Imagine yourself discovering the world formula. An insight that, in the wrong hands, could mean the downfall of humanity. What to do Announce? Conceal? Or fake insanity to save the world?

Physicist Möbius opts for staged madness. In order to protect this formula from misuse, he retires to a sanatorium — led by Dr. Mathilde von Zahnd. There are two mysterious murders of nurses there. The perpetrators seem to have been found quickly. But it soon becomes apparent that nothing is as it seems. Dürrenmatt wrote his piece in the shadow of the Cold War and the nuclear threat and yet the piece is more relevant today than ever. The world formula remains a symbol of those scientific findings whose consequences can no longer be controlled. At a time when knowledge means power — and power is rarely moral — the piece asks the uncomfortable question: Who is responsible for what is conceivable? With works such as Romulus the Great, The Visit of the Old Lady and The Physicists, Dürrenmatt became one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century.

Director Bastian Kraft, who has already staged Max Frisch's biography: A Play, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion as well as Death of a Salesman (2017) and The Visit of the Old Lady (2014) at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, dedicates himself to the Dürrenmatt classic with a keen sense of the tragicomic and a precise look at the abysses below the surface. The action unfolds with the suspense of a crime play; each scene triggers the next, as if in a chain reaction. The central question is: Can a disaster be stopped once it has been presented as a possibility? And so Dürrenmatt's play itself becomes a dramatic chain reaction in which the inevitable inexorably takes shape.