The Shadows

The Shieveh Theatre Company has been in existence for over 25 years and its productions can be seen at festivals all over the world. The company already deeply moved the HAU audience in 2024 with its production ‘The Child’. ‘The Shadows’ (‘Die Schatten’), which premiered in July 2026 at ‘Theater der Welt’, also addresses questions of guilt, the law and personal responsibility not in a theoretical manner. These are existential and political issues. Stemming from a sensitive and exploratory engagement with the conditions of today’s world, the work is based on three real and documented stories, whose emotional and existential trajectories bear a striking resemblance to the timeless figures of Jocasta (Oedipus), Antigone and Medea. In doing so, it breathes new life into these mythological figures and allows their voices and fates to resonate amidst the crises, contradictions and uncertainties of our time.

How do narratives of fate, loss, resistance and despair shape the human experience across the centuries?

The creative process behind “The Shadows” has been profoundly shaped, particularly in recent months, by the artistic team’s lived experiences in Iran – months characterised by increasing instability, emotional intensity and a growing sense of the fragility of everyday life. During this intense and turbulent period, the team felt ever more keenly the heavy burden of the shadows weighing upon their lives and existence. This realisation did not remain abstract, but permeated the creative process, altering its rhythm, tone and inner urgency.

In this way, the work has evolved into a sensitive resonance with the present, into an artistic space in which experience, memory and perception are interwoven, in which vulnerability finds a voice, and in which the creative process attempts to give form to that which often remains on the fringes of what can be put into words.