Corpus Delicti // 15+ - School performance

Siblings Mia and Moritz Holl grow up in a system - called THE METHOD - that tries to protect people from physical suffering by any means necessary. Health is the highest goal of the state. It is not only strict hygiene laws that ensure this goal is achieved. While natural scientist Mia Holl is in favor of THE METHOD, her brother's ability to adapt is not strong enough, his love of freedom is too great. She accuses him of antisocial behavior, he accuses her of being afraid to feel what life really means. Now Moritz is dead. A DNA test has proven that he was raped with fatal consequences, and he commits suicide while in custody. Mia mourns his death and neglects her health protocols, which puts her in the sights of the justice system and in the clutches of a fundamental advocate of DIE METHODE. She increasingly doubts her brother's guilt and becomes the 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 in 2007, was a response to the stricter legal situation in the wake of the international fight against terrorism. In his work, Matthias Kaschig questions the relationship between the individual and their right to self-determination in relation to their responsibility towards the community. Corpus Delicti" is a courtroom drama, the task of every court case and every theater evening is to compile loose stories into a comprehensible course of events and motive. But who has sovereignty over these life stories? The play is an example of how they are devised and reshaped and how a blameless person can become a danger to the general public. After God has been declared dead, man finds the meaning of his life in the pursuit of health. The production raises the question of how much brightness a person can tolerate. Shouldn't there be a right to blackness? After all, Moritz Holl asks, wasn't sleep invented so that we could get used to death night after night?