Next Week’s Terrorist Attack

Paris, Nice, St Petersburg, London, Brussels, Berlin. The terror attacks in Europe during the last few years all had one thing in common: Armin Stummer was there, but he can’t explain why. One New Year’s Eve, Göttinger, a police detective, confronts him. He is obsessed with trying to find the connection between the attacks and the strangely circuitous route taken by Armin Stummer. Superficially, he seems harmless enough: an engineer installing light systems, he follows the artist André Tartini from one country to the next. At his shows, Tartini enthrals his audience, letting them release the anxieties that plague their daily lives, which Tartini collects and imbibes to let them bloom into spectacular paradises of fear growing from beneath the ground, breaking the surface and reaching upwards towards the sky. Until, yet again, something happens...

Thomas Arzt’s new play probes the structure of a fear that threatens to engulf both individuals and societies and which mutates into a fantastical force of nature with the power to break steel. Where fear collects and grows, hate will strike.