Name: Biedermann and the Arsonists
Start: 2025-10-15T00:00:00
Location: Theater Basel

Daniel Lommatzsch

Sebastian Baumgarten

Vera Flück

Jan Bluthardt

Bärbel Schwarz

Barbara Colceriu

Marie Löcker

Alina Trippl

Phaea Korycik

Esther Gaspart Michels

Annabelle Witt

Vassilios Chassapakis

Stefan Pucher

Christopher Uhe

Theater Basel

«I am young, rich, and educated; and I am unhappy, neurotic, and alone.» These words open ‹Mars›, the cult book of the early 1980s. Raised in affluence, Zurich native Fritz Angst feels cheated out of life and raised to death by the bourgeois coldness of his world. Shortly before losing his battle with cancer in 1976, he wrote a passionate tirade under the name Fritz Zorn: his illness was not a personal fate, but a reflection of social decay. The book became a scandalous point of reference for the angry Swiss youth of the 1980s.

Mars

A spectacular founding of a city: Benedikt von Peters’ spatial staging invites the audience to wander through the supposed paradise city of Mahagonny. Here, there is endless pleasure and everything is permitted, as long as you can pay – «but something is missing!». To escape the emptiness, the inhabitants eat and drink themselves to death, fuck and box their way to the grave. Only in Jim Mahoney does the idea of a more humane existence quietly take root.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Gottlieb Biedermann, a hair tonic manufacturer, wants to see the good in people for once. Intoxicated by his own idealism, he offers hospitality to two strangers. Yet warnings about arsonists are everywhere: disguised as poor peddlers, they take up residence in the attics of law-abiding citizens – and reduce everything to rubble and ashes.

Biedermann and the Arsonists