The Silence

In the organizer's words:

For his autofictional play "The Silence," author and theater director Falk Richter goes back into his own family history. His father died without being able to have a reconciliatory discussion with his son. In a dialogue with his mother, he takes a look at decades of unspoken truths, repressed secrets, and unprocessed traumas that still haunt him to this day. How did the horrors his father experienced during the war become inscribed in the family history and in his parents' marriage, like the trauma of his mother's expulsion and flight from West Prussia? What was concealed in the family for years? How did the author and his sister grow up in the West German province of the post-war period, how did the family construct itself? How was the author's gay identity, which was already emerging in his teens, suppressed and fought against by his parents? How was the reaction to homophobic hostility he experienced? How do trauma, silence, and violent repression continue in the author's own relationships? The confrontation between mother and son becomes a journey into the abysses of West German bourgeois society from the postwar period to the present. But how reliable is the author's own memory, how credible is his mother's life story? And couldn't everything have been completely different? Soon the autobiographical and the fictional are mixed, memories contradict each other and possibilities of other realities open up. In the play with autobiography and fiction, in the contradictions of one's own history, hope also germinates: What other models of masculinity, and thus other kinds of fatherhood and parenthood, are possible? What forms of relationships exist beyond patriarchal oppression and violence? What could a completely different life look like?
Falk Richter was born in Hamburg in 1969 and worked for many years as an author and theater producer at the Schaubühne. Since then, he has directed at numerous German-language and international theaters and was named Director of the Year (Theater heute) in 2018 for his production "Am Königsweg." He will return to work regularly at the Schaubühne starting with the 2023/24 season.
The production premiered at TNS and MC93 Bobigny. This content has been machine translated.