This is the centre of society: The young businessman Hoffmann has married into an engineering company and has assured his own status and prosperity, which he defends with right-wing populist statements. His pregnant wife Martha oscillates between depression and the bliss of motherhood. Her younger sister Helene wants to help her with the new baby and has slipped back under the parental roof, which is shaped by the father’s alcoholism. When journalist Alfred Loth, who writes for a left-wing weekly newspaper, descends on his former college friend Hoffmann, the cracks in the foundations of this successful society become evident.
As one of the most frequently performed contemporary dramatists, Ewald Palmetshofer has brought Gerhart Hauptmann’s classic social criticism surprisingly close to our present times. He shifts the focus from Hauptmann’s social study of hereditary alcoholism to a political psychograph, an exploration of characters and constellations where right-wing populism returns in the guise of economic cleverness and oppression appears masked as family relations. However, the play also holds up a mirror to the failure of left-wing intellectualism. This production will be directed by Stefan Pucher who has a close working relationship with Ewald Palmetshofer. In the face of the increasingly exacerbated political situation, the author will once more adapt and hone his congenial rewriting of Hauptmann.