Hannah Zabrisky tritt nicht auf

She is a woman without any family, without any close friends. She can look back on a great career, but she doesn’t know whether the coming years have anything in store for her that might make it worth getting up in the morning. Outside of the theatre, a clusterfuck of entangled problems is running riot: wars and political conflicts that seem to be escalating ever faster, democracies ground down, disruption. Hannah wants a new script, a different kind of confrontation between herself and the world.


There used to be an intensity to her life, a belief that her own art could change things. There used to be a rebellious teen- ager inside of her, who fell silent over the course of the years, and is now speaking up again. What do you want with yourself, your art, your life? Which side of history do you want to be on? Somewhere between a dream, reality and the film scripts of her favourite directors, Hannah races through her internal forms of resistance – improvising against the scripts of the present. She pushes the other actors and actresses in her ensemble, the director, the author and the producer to their limits and beyond.


When she refuses to simply carry on, this triggers a chain of confusion, unplanned derailments, conflicts, crises, but also unexpected alliances and new connections among the other members of the ensemble. The levels of actors and roles, reality and fiction soon shift. The conflicts and questions of the play being rehearsed become intertwined with the real challenges and problems facing the director, the author and the actors – until the boundaries between art and life become completely blurred.



Falk Richter was born in Hamburg in 1969 and worked for many years as a playwright and theatre maker at the Schaubühne. He subsequently directed productions at numerous Germanspeaking and international theatres and was voted Director of the Year (Theater heute) in 2018 for his production »Am Königsweg«. In the 2023/24 season his productions »The Silence« and »Bad Kingdom« premi- ered at the Schaubühne. »The Silence« was invited to the 2024 Theatertreffen.


(IN GERMAN)