the templar knight (der tempelherr)

Ferdinand Schmalz’s latest play starts with the sunny prospect of a small piece of land far away from the city. Heiner has bought it for himself, his pregnant wife Petra and their unborn child. But what is intended as meaningful whole, a larger context, soon gets out of hand. Stunned, the people around him – villagers, his financier and father-in-law, his friends, his wife – watch as, after weeks of meditation, he begins like a madman to build a construction with his own hands. But the result is not a "house, / with walls, / doors, / windows, / cellar, / dining room, / children’s room, / bedroom, / and guest room, / bathroom and toilet, / shower in the house, / half-hipped roof, / terrace, / carport". Instead of these and similar achievements, Heiner reveals a shining white temple – "as if a god had torn it/ from the acropolis". Soon the construction site grows beyond measure: the lord of the temple reinvents himself and his piece of land "from the ruins of the continent".  The others remain onlookers. What they consider crazy, Heiner considers essential; whatever he is building remains a mystery to them. The lord of the temple builds alignments, colonnades, labyrinthine structures in quest of meaning, a creation that defies all eras and past projects and bursts into the future. A new house, a city, an alternative to everything that exists – and in the end, a mausoleum that swallows the architect.

Invited to the 37th Heidelberger Stückemarkt