Mad Blood

Along with minarets, young men with a background have become the scourge of German society in the daily fight to preserve Western civilization.  That background is usually a migrant one, or a Muslim one or one removed from education.   Sometimes these fears are driven by roots, which will be Turkish or Arab because these men force their wives to wear headscarves and murder their sisters for reasons of family honour while the State denies them any means of subsistence for refusing to integrate while instead of working they stay at home and conceive new girls with headscarves.

So much for the prevailing clichés of the current debate about Islam.  The only chance of solving this problem rests with Germany’s schools: education, education, education! 

One day one of the teachers on whom the nation is pinning its final hopes is presented with an unusual opportunity: she is busy attempting to make one of the classics of Western theatre accessible to these surly, ill-disciplined pupils with migrant backgrounds when a gun falls into her hands in a scuffle, a real gun. She hesitates for a moment and then takes her class hostage and forces them at gunpoint to get up on the school stage and perform.  This hostage-taking not only unleashes an exuberant combination of genres, from thriller to comedy and melodrama, it also cheerfully deconstructs a set of apparently clear identities.

Mad Blood is a collaboration with the Ballhaus Naunystraße Berlin, Germany’s unique post-migrant theatre.

A co-production between the Ruhrtriennale and the Ballhaus Naunystraße, Berlin.