Polaris

Venue: Chamber - “Nervous breakdown in Antarctica — Russian researcher stabs colleagues down” — was the title of Focus magazine in October 2018. Both men, Oleg B. and Sergei S., were enthusiastic readers and thus filled the long hours spent in Antarctic solitude. One day, Oleg had told his colleague the end of a book, whereupon he critically injured him with a knife. What initially sounds like an unusual dispute over books and spoilers reveals a complex story about human limits in the endless expanse of Antarctica.

On the trail of crime in this unique landscape, director Jan-Christoph Gockel, who most recently staged the celebrated Theatre Marathon Hospital of Spirits at DT, travels to Neumayer Station III in Antarctica in January 2026 with documentary filmmaker Lion Bischof and actors Julia Gräfner and Wolfram Koch.

As a stateless “no man's land,” Antarctica is one of the last common spaces of humanity that is still largely unaffected by humans. Its undisturbed natural state provides exceptional conditions for scientific research and international cooperation. However, Antarctica has become fragile in a new age of imperialism. It is therefore not only ecologically but also politically a special, utopian place.

At the end of the journey, there is a surreal mocumentary play between fiction and film documentary, in which the white landscape of Antarctica not only becomes a narrative map, but also a mirror of the human soul.