• Science and Madness
• Point of No Return
• World Formula

Imagine discovering the world formula. A discovery that, in the wrong hands, could spell the end of humanity. What to do? Announce it? Hide it? Or feign insanity to save the world?

The physicist Möbius decides to feign insanity. To protect the formula from misuse, he retreats to a sanatorium run by Dr. Mathilde von Zahnd. There, two mysterious murders of nurses occur. The perpetrators seem to be quickly found. But it soon becomes apparent that nothing is as it seems. Dürrenmatt wrote his play in the shadow of the Cold War and the nuclear threat, yet today the play is more relevant than ever. The “world formula” remains a symbol of scientific discoveries whose consequences can no longer be controlled. At a time when knowledge means power – and power is rarely moral – the play asks the uncomfortable question: Who is responsible for what is conceivable? With works such as Romulus the Great, The Visit, and The Physicists, Dürrenmatt became one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century.

Director Bastian Kraft, who has already staged The Visit, Max Frisch's Biography: A Play, and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, devotes himself to Dürrenmatt's classic with a keen sense of the tragicomic and a precise eye for the abysses beneath the surface. The plot unfolds with the suspense of a crime drama; each scene triggers the next, like a chain reaction. At the heart of the play is the central question: Can a catastrophe still be averted once it has been raised as a possibility? And so Dürrenmatt's play itself becomes a dramatic chain reaction in which the inevitable inexorably takes shape.