Rache (AT)

A production by the FARN Collective

Revenge is an ancient word—and one that has returned in many forms. It rarely begins as a plan; almost always, it springs from anger: from the experience of insult, injustice, or humiliation. Emotion can give way to purpose; pain can become a reckoning. Ancient tragedies depict this transition not as a psychological profile, but as a mechanism: where justice is suspended, a substitute order emerges. Violence becomes a self-perpetuating logic. The world shrinks to a binary alternative. It is precisely this dynamic that is reemerging today: in private “economies of offense,” in comment sections, on ideological battle lines, and in political discourse. 

The FARN Collective approaches the topic through the lens of myth—not as a museum, but as a laboratory. This exaggeration reveals what is quickly obscured in everyday life: how seductive retribution sounds, how elegantly it justifies itself, while it ravages relationships, language, and rules.

The production describes the conditions under which revenge arises and becomes socially acceptable. It traces how a feeling considered “blind” is often merely displaced in Western societies: into legal proceedings, into morality, into codes of belonging, and into public outrage. It distinguishes retribution from justice, punishment from restitution, and the impulse to inflict pain in return from the hope of ending it. REVENGEobserves how quickly “it hurts” turns into “you’ll pay”—and what this shift means for thought, language, and action.

The FARN Collective is known for its practice of constantly shifting roles “behind the scenes,” which, in the case of the productionRACHE, means that Sandra Hüller and Tom Schneider will co-direct. With this play, the collective continues its exploration of antiquity following*Hydra* and*Penthesile:a:s*.

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