Schaubühne Berlin: The Silence
Finnish National Theatre, Main Stage
Fri 21.8.2026 20:00
Sat 22.8.2026 15:00
Duration: approx. 105min, no interval
For his autofictional play »The Silence«, the playwright and theatre director Falk Richter delves into his own family history. His father died before he and his son, the author, had a reconciliatory conversation. In a dialogue with his mother, Richter focuses on truths that have remained unspoken for decades alongside suppressed secrets and unresolved traumas that continue to haunt him to this day. How did the horrors experienced by his father during the war and the trauma of his mother’s expulsion and flight from West Prussia inscribe themselves into his family history and his parents’ marriage? What has been kept secret in the family for years? How did the playwright and his sister grow up in the provinces of post-war West Germany, how did the family develop? How was Richter’s gay identity, already emerging in his teenage years, suppressed and attacked by his parents? How did everyone react to the homophobic hostility he experienced? How do trauma, silence and violent oppression continue to have an impact on the playwright’s own relationships today? This confrontation between mother and son becomes a journey into the chasms of West German bourgeois society from the post war period to the present. But how reliable is Richter’s own memory? How credible the narrative of his mother? And could it all possibly have been completely different? Soon, the autobiographical mixes with the fictional, memories contradict one another and the possibilities of other realities emerge. But in playing with autobiography and fiction, and in the contradictions of his own history, an opportunity for hope presents itself: What alternative models of masculinity, and thus other types of fatherhood and parenthood, are possible? What kind of relationships exist beyond patriarchal oppression and violence? What form could a completely different life take?
Language: German, with subtitles in Finnish and English.
Post-show discussion with Falk Richter and Johanna Freundlich on Saturday, August 22, following the performance. The discussion will be held in English.
Written and Directed by: Falk Richter
Set and Costume Design: Katrin Hoffmann
Music: Daniel Freitag
Video: Lion Bischof
Dramaturgy: Nils Haarmann & Jens Hillje
Lighting Design: Carsten Sander
On stage: Dimitrij Schaad
A new German-language version for the Schaubühne. The first version of the performance premiered at TNS Strasbourg as a co-production with MC93 Bobigny and the Maison de la Culture d’Amiens.
Schaubühne Berlin
The Schaubühne was founded in 1962 and is nowadays one of the most famous and renowned theatres in the German speaking area. Since 1999 it has been led by artistic director Thomas Ostermeier. As one of Berlin’s five largest ensemble and repertory theatres, it stands for modern, contemporary theatre.
Read more »
Bios
Press reviews
Falk Richter, who returns to the Schaubühne with »The Silence«, has created something quite extraordinary with this play. (Berliner Morgenpost, Nov. 21st, 2023)
Sometimes literature, theater or film is more precise than any historical treatise. treatise. That’s what makes this play by Richter so great in miniature. He paints a climate of anxiety, of violence against queer people, a biotope of repression. […] It’s Falk’s evening – and a fabulous solo for Dimitrij Schad. (Tagesspiegel, Nov. 21st, 2023)
Richter’s sensitive text and Schaad’s magnificent acting set something in motion where, like the autofictional Richter himself, you don’t want to go. To the place where feelings are that absolutely need to be felt. (taz, Nov. 21st, 2023)
Dimitrij Schaad as Falk Richter navigates through all of this with captivating clarity and a fabulous balance: delicately bitter in humor, restrained in everything sad and incongruous, loosely extending the cloak of meta-commentary in case a striptease of the soul threatens. (nachtkritik, Nov. 20th, 2023)
Falk Richter has achieved something […] to combine the means of the open narrative style, the incessant refractions, the “cool fun” with a very unique sincerity and directness. […] And in Dimitrij Schaad, Richter has found the ideal man for his project. It is the Schaubühne’s most impressive solo since Lars Eidinger’s Goya evening with Rodrigo Garcia in 2011 – at least. (nachtkritik, Nov. 20th, 2023)