Falk Richter

"Tom and Joy, a neo-romantic love story from the start of the 21st century. Tom is a resilient and extremely flexible consultant whose only foothold is the porno channel in his hotel room. Tonight he is wandering around the corridors of a hotel complex. He's lost his orientation and no longer knows where he is: Berlin, London, New York, Hongkong, Singapore. He thinks of Joy ...
Joy is a stand-in on the scanner-till of Prêt-à-manger International, someone who didn't finish her studies, a flexible and adaptable colleague. Her dream is George Clooney. Tonight around two she is standing at her little till at the airport, paralysed with panic. Twenty businessmen want to pay for their sandwiches, but the scanner has broken down, the till is on strike, the system collapses. She thinks of Tom ... They fell in love while fighting over the last place on a flight home to Berlin. They were arrested and locked up together; the start of a great love ... Now her life is being filmed in a realtime docu-soap".
(Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz)

Responses to the Play:

"Falk Richter's 'Electronic City' is a fairytale for media-times. It takes place in an electronic metropolis, a global city, which is dominated by the universal service industry. It demands the flexible human being who disintegrates under the pressures of digitalised communication (always reachable and always available) and globalised standardisation (everything looks the same, everything tastes the same), and is only capable of recognising him- or herself as O or I in ever-changing sequences of numbers. The only opportunity of escaping these streams of data and capital is offered by a power failure, a breakdown in the system, the hysterical void that then gets under way.
Nevertheless 'Electronic City' invents many images and makes use of narrative elements, but in the moment of their invention thay are rejected as a deception. They are incapable of representing the system. Falk Richter's play doesn't represent the system either; it has to be said that this play is the system".
(Stephan Wetzel's description of the play for the Fischer Verlag/Theater und Medien)

"Falk Richter's 'Electronic City', a panic-stricken farce from the inner mental world of contemporary busyness, sorts out a number of supposed certainties and punctures the boundaries between the perpetrators, profiteers, and victims of globalisation. A modern consciousness's guidelines of reality, at the apogee of today's communications technologies, are lovingly trimmed".
(Franz Wille in: Theater Heute, 11/2003)

Technical Data:

Premiere:	Bochum Schauspielhaus, 4.10.2003
Director:	Matthias Hartmann
Number of Performers:	1 female, 1 male, a team of 4-15 actors
Rights:	S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Theater und Medien Hedderichstr. 114 60596 Frankfurt/Main Postfach 700355 Tel. +49 69 6062271 Fax +49 69 6062355 theater@s-fischer.de
Translations:	Theatre Library