Corpus Delicti // 15+

The siblings Mia and Moritz Holl grow up in a system - called THE METHOD - which tries by all means to save people from physical suffering. Health is the highest goal of the state. Not only strict hygiene laws ensure that this goal is achieved. While the natural scientist Mia Holl approves of THE METHOD, her brother's adaptability is too little, his love of freedom too great. She accuses him of antisocial behavior, he of her fear of feeling what life really means. Now Moritz is dead. A DNA test has proven that he was raped to death, and he commits suicide while in custody. Mia mourns him, neglecting her health protocols, thus falling into the sights of the justice system and into the clutches of a fundamental advocate of THE METHOD. She increasingly doubts her brother's guilt and becomes a pawn in a show trial in which she is stylized as an enemy of the state.

The play ,,Corpus Delicti", written by Juli Zeh as a commission for the Ruhrtriennale, was a response to the tightened legal situation in the wake of the international fight against terrorism in 2007. In his work, Matthias Kaschig questions the relationship of the individual and his right to self-determination in relation to his responsibility to the community. Corpus Delicti" is a courtroom drama, the task of every court case and every evening of theater is to bring together loose stories to form a comprehensible course of events and motive. But who has sovereignty over these life stories? The play shows in an exemplary way how they are invented and reshaped and how a blameless person can become a danger for the general public. After God has been declared dead, here man finds the meaning of his life in the pursuit of health. The production raises the question of how much brightness man can tolerate. Should there not be a right to blackness? Because, Moritz Holl asks, sleep was not invented so that we could get used to death night after night.