In the organizer's words:

The German-language premiere of the play "The Last Night of the World" by the successful French author Laurent Gaudé will be postponed from March 1, 2025 to November 19, 2025. The venue is the Science Dome at experimenta in Heilbronn. Elias Perrig's production will be the opening premiere of the next "Science & Theatre" festival, which will take place from November 19-23, 2025 as a cooperation between Theater Heilbronn and experimenta.

The world is on the brink of major changes: The night as a resting phase for humans and animals is being abolished. From now on, there will be 24-hour activity in the world of work and business. Everyone will have a short window of time to sleep. Thanks to a new drug, however, this only lasts 45 minutes. After three quarters of an hour's sleep, people are just as rested as they would normally be after seven or eight hours of sleep. This means that everyone has almost twice as long an active life if they no longer have to sleep so much. They can achieve almost twice as much. The productivity of society, indeed of humanity as a whole, increases immeasurably because there are no longer any time differences to take into account. What a revolution!

Gabor, a protagonist of this turning point, has to travel to the other side of the world on the last real night before the introduction of the nightless day in order to accompany the abolition there. His wife Lou, who was injured during violent riots by the "Black Night Movement" against this social transformation, is in hospital and asks her husband to stay. Gabor flies anyway. Thousands of kilometers away from her, he receives a call from the hospital telling him to come immediately if he wants to see Lou alive. But due to the worldwide system changeover, there are no more flights on the "last night".

But it is not only in his relationship that Gabor pays a high price for his belief in progress. The whole world is changing under the dictates of incessant growth and ever-increasing productivity, which are trying to completely override the laws of nature.

The author Laurent Gaudé, who is extremely renowned in France and has won numerous prizes, has consistently thought through established procedures and thought experiments from the worlds of business, medicine and society to their logical conclusion. His vision of the future is certainly technically conceivable. But Gaudé asks about their impact on people and nature and questions whether everything that scientific research would make possible should actually be implemented. "The Last Night of the World" is the winning play in the third "Science & Theatre" drama competition and will have its German-language premiere in the experimenta Science Dome.

Dr. Mirjam Meuser, the curator of the "Science & Theatre" festival, said in her laudatory speech: "In five acts, Gabor explores in leaps through time the tragic addiction to the gods of capitalism and its intrinsic motivation to convert man into a working machine that can be used around the clock ... 'The Last Night of the World' explores in a poetic and parable-like way the question of what happens to us when we produce 24 hours without ceasing and drive the exploitation of ourselves and nature to the absolute."