Perfection
Nach dem Roman von Vincenzo Latronico
Anta Recke
Uraufführung
In German and English
Followed by a premiere party
Friday, October 2, 2026
8:00 pm
Prater
ausverkauft
For what felt like a quarter of a century, Berlin – with its seemingly endless resources of space and time – had been a testing ground for people from all over the world to try out new lifestyles. Urban open spaces – remnants of a vibrant history – were reinvented as pop-up galleries, party venues, and affordable living spaces, and then gradually transformed into architecturally generic surfaces and objects of speculation behind freshly painted facades. This change had an impact on not only vacant lots but also their temporary residents and visitors, who were once welcome to boost the value of the derelict structures through their cultural capital.
Anna and Tom are the central characters in Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection, which was nominated for last year’s Booker Prize. They moved here from Southern Europe in the mid-2000s to escape the constraints of their homeland. Attracted by digitally generated designs promising self-fulfilment and an idealised form of contemporaneity, they have to realise that these images evaporate as soon as they begin to come true.
The city becomes a setting for loneliness and transcendental homelessness: Liberty and personal fulfilment seem within reach. At the same time, the protagonists are finding themselves cut off from any meaningful connection between the individual, the world and history. In Anna and Tom’s experience, the past, present, and future are all a bit blurred. The same goes for the “East” and “West” of Berlin. Could the promises of personalised life plans centred on individuality have been just the first step towards conforming to a new uniformity?
Three years after Anna and Tom, in 2007, Munich-born director Anta Recke also chose to move to Berlin and complete school education there. Today she is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary German-language theatre, known for her evocative visual worlds and bold conceptual statements.
For this production, Recke teamed up with set designer and visual artist Marta Dyachenko to create an arena in which the gaze moves freely between those who are present. Unlike the carefully curated Instagram realities, the theatre becomes a place for gathering where what you’re looking at will naturally look back at you.
The Prater on Kastanienallee, steeped in a history of its own as a popular theatre and more recently the subject of a fierce property dispute, is a self-referential stage for the production of Perfection. Closed for restoration for the last ten years, the fully rehabilitated Prater building looks like a reconstruction or a museum artefact, something out of a bygone world. It’s 2026, and the Volksbühne is back in this place full of memories. Let’s see who is still here? Who left long ago? And who’s coming? For Berlin and Germany as a whole, the question is: Who’s going to be allowed to come – now and in the future?
Besetzung
Besetzung
- Inga Busch
- Marie Goyette
- Benjamin Radjaipour
- Damian Rebgetz
- Joyce Sanhá
Live-Musik
- Ted Gaier
Aufführungen
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Prater
Perfection
Nach dem Roman von Vincenzo Latronico
Anta Recke
Uraufführung
In German and English
Followed by a premiere party
ausverkauft
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Tickets
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