Postscript: an interesting interview with Castellucci over at Exberliner. Interviewer - Summer Banks.
A friend once told me she'd rather die than be late to the theatre. There's certainly something horrifying in arriving after the lights have gone down - it encapsulates everything about theatre as a social event, and your personal violation of it. Suddenly you are accidentally in a nightmarish minority.
So it was that I was pedaling frantically, not for the first time, towards Charlottenberg and the Schaubühne, watching the time hurtle towards 8pm and desperately cursing my poor Berlin geography as I took my 3rd wrong turn.
If there's a show not to be late to, it's probably Romeo Castellucci's Hyperion: Letters from a Terrorist. In the first 5 minutes, I'm reliably told, a man enters a well-furnished, mod cons apartment - decorated with more than the usual straight lines, plasma screens and hospital aesthetics - does nothing for a moment, and leaves again, never to be explained. A police unit, fully adorned in swat gear, bursts into the apartment and proceeds to search it. What they are looking for is question which also remains unanswered, only becoming more urgently so as more and more police file into the apartment and begin to trash it entirely. When the place is a complete mess - a chaotic parody of its former discipline - they turn to the audience. And now it's our turn. Every single member of the audience is forcibly evacuated.
"What a perfect way to illustrate the sliding scale of the ethics of interogation" I would have thought. Had I been there.