Director Andreas Merz in Conversation
Dürrenmatt wrote The Physicists against the backdrop of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. What is the central premise of your production?
The Physicists is Dürrenmatt’s “atomic play,” yet the physicists in the play are not actually nuclear physicists. The core question is the responsibility of science. At the time, the defining issue was the nuclear crisis and its potential for destruction. Those fears still exist today, but we seem to have made our peace with them. What has dominated our public debate in recent years is the danger of artificial intelligence, because humanity fears losing control over its own destiny. This isn’t a radical reinterpretation of the play, but rather a tightening of focus — or a logical next step.
In Dürrenmatt’s version, external forces appear to exploit scientific knowledge and apply it immorally. In our production, knowledge itself emancipates from those powers — and may, in an act of self-determination, turn against all of humanity.
The World Formula that Möbius discovers in the play poses a threat to humanity if it falls into the wrong hands. Who are these powerful figures?
In the case of artificial intelligence, the powerful ones are the tech bros of Silicon Valley. They represent an ultraliberal worldview — a rejection of any kind of limitation or regulation. That’s actually very close to Dr. von Zahnd’s reasoning in the play: once something has been scientifically discovered, it must also be applied. In that sense, Möbius’s discoveries would have to be pursued to their logical conclusion, even if their application entails enormous risks.
This creates a vicious circle of perpetual progress. AI simulates endlessly — countless possibilities. That is very much in line with Dürrenmatt’s idea, because, if we’re honest, his sanatorium is also a kind of simulation, albeit not a digital one. People who are actually agents of the state pretend to be nurses and caregivers. That seemed perfectly suited to the play. The plot is constructed like an experiment designed to analyze, extract, and make use of Möbius’s knowledge and thinking. Möbius is not master of his own destiny and cannot control his knowledge; instead, he is exploited and becomes the victim of his own creation.
What risks does artificial intelligence pose in everyday life, but also in art?
I think we are facing enormous upheavals in our social structures. Take public administration, for instance: ideally, AI could make bureaucratic processes easier, but that also means many administrative jobs will disappear. There’s a massive redistribution happening, and that can lead to deeper social divisions. As with the industrial revolution, the dream was that people would work less — but unfortunately, the benefits were never distributed evenly.
What we’re witnessing now is how AI is already changing our everyday lives, because we use it constantly—whether as a conversation partner or to write letters and texts. The concern, as always with such technological shifts, is how dependent and thereby how unfree we might become, once we outsource certain steps of thinking to machines.
In the arts, I see how our set and costume designer, Galya Solodovnikova, and our video artist, Oleg Mikhailov, use AI brilliantly. It doesn’t mean they’re any less creative — if anything, it allows them to be even more creative. What makes me happy, though, is that theatre — as old-fashioned as it may seem — will absolutely endure, because even a robotic stage cannot replace the immediacy of human contact.
How can artificial intelligence be represented on stage?
Through video art, we can depict a manipulated reality. And when that’s in the hands of someone powerful, it’s as if that person holds the remote control to the movie of your life. We deliberately wanted to work with the principle of repetition and parallelity and translate that into the stage design: a seemingly conventional set that extends infinitely toward the back, creating a visual distortion of reality.
The stage and costumes, however, appear to belong to another era. How do the digital and the analog connect? Aesthetically, we wanted to stay close to the play and its author. Dürrenmatt had his commercial breakthrough with crime fiction and remained loyal to the genre as a vehicle for his plays. That’s why we’re referencing film noir of the 1950s — a genre that distorts reality. The characters, in that sense, feel as though they are “in the wrong movie.”
What defines Dürrenmatt — his writing, and the way he wraps serious subjects in grotesques and comedies?
This is my first time directing Dürrenmatt, and you always get to know someone through working on their texts. I like to read biographies beforehand because I think you can often recognize a person’s life in their writing. Dürrenmatt’s work is very intelligent — he comes from a philosophical background, so he doesn’t write TV realism, but carefully composed, intellectually rigorous sentences.
Dürrenmatt’s characters are both free and unfree at the same time. I often thought of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus: Sisyphus cannot escape his role of pushing the rock uphill, and his freedom lies merely in the awareness that he doesn’t have to be identical with the place he’s been assigned. Dürrenmatt’s text feels shockingly inevitable — almost at the level of a Greek tragedy, where the individual struggles against an unstoppable fate. That’s very characteristic of him, and we often said during rehearsals: “It’s such a joy to work with the text of someone who truly masters the craft of writing.”
Interview by Jan Pfannenstiel
starring: Mascha Schneider, Kristin Muthwill, Henning Strübbe, René Schwittay, Philipp Mauritz, Jon-Kaare Koppe, Charlotte Liv Elvstrøm, Nina Marleen Riedel, Laura Spörl, Leonie Renner
director: Andreas Merz
set- and costume design: Galya Solodovnikova
video: Oleg Mikhailov
dramaturgy: Jan Pfannenstiel
photos: Thomas M. Jauk
The Physicists, Dürrenmatt
Hans Otto Theater, Potsdam, Germany
„What was once thought can never be unthought“