Totes Gebirge

Dead Mountains takes place in a mental asylum. But unlike other plays about psychiatry, the patients here do not serve as an anarchic counterpart to the standardized majority of society, but are just as sick as the world from which they tried to escape into this closed ward. The melancholic chief psychiatrist has long since resigned herself to the fact that her treatment of individual cases, given the background of social deficits, can never be more than patchwork. Currently, she is concerned about three patients. Raimund, just recently admitted, seems to be catatonic, Nepomuk is suffering from brain damage caused by drug abuse, and Emanuel, who has been unemployed for many years, has given up on himself. Anton, a nurse, is the only one remaining optimistic, and so he works on a puppet theater play for New Year’s Eve, while Nepomuk firmly believes that by the turn of the year, a huge comet will hit and destroy everything.

Dead Mountains shows the cataclysm, even on a personal scale, as the only way out of a system that is constantly being optimized, and for that we have to pay with self-exploitation and burnout crises. Arzt counters this with the primal force of folk theater, a magic extravaganza, a puppet theater play, and by doing so, he formally creates an explosive mix of longing for doomsday and spirited defiance.