10 – 12 APR 2026 From Friday to Sunday at 8.00 pm Show in German with surtitles in Spanish Matinée: Sunday 12 APR 2026 at 12.00 pm
Please arrive well in advance as the auditorium will be closed once the performance has begun.
To collect tickets, our box offices will be open from Monday to Sunday from 2.30 pm to 8.30 pm.
Falk Richter
Dimitrij Schaad
Falk Richter and Doris Waltraud Richter
Katrin Hoffmann
Carsten Sander
Daniel Freitag
Lion Bischof
Schaubühne Berlin
About the show
For his autofictional play The Silence, playwright and director Falk Richter delves into his own family history. His father died before the two of them—father and son—could have a reconciliatory conversation. In a dialogue with his mother, Richter confronts truths that have remained hidden for decades, along with repressed secrets and unresolved traumas that continue to haunt him. How were the horrors experienced by his father during the war and the trauma of his mother’s expulsion and flight from West Prussia inscribed into the family history and his parents’ marriage? What remained unspoken in the family for years? How did the playwright and his sister grow up in a small town in post-war West Germany? How did the family evolve? How did his parents repress and attack Richter’s gay identity, which began to emerge during his adolescence? How did they all respond to the homophobic hostility he faced? How do trauma, silence and violent oppression continue to shape the playwright’s relationships today?
This confrontation between mother and son becomes a journey into the depths of bourgeois society in West Germany, from the post-war period to the present day. But how reliable is Richter’s memory? How credible is your mother’s account? Could everything have happened completely differently? Soon, the autobiographical blurs into the fictional, memories contradict one another and the possibility of alternate realities begins to emerge. By playing with autobiography and fiction, and within the contradictions of his own story, a space for hope emerges: What alternative models of masculinity, and therefore of fatherhood and parenthood, might be possible? What kinds of relationships can exist beyond patriarchal oppression and violence? What might a completely different life look like?
Falk Richter
Dimitrij Schaad
Falk Richter and Doris Waltraud Richter
Katrin Hoffmann
Carsten Sander
Daniel Freitag
Lion Bischof
Schaubühne Berlin
Falk Richter is a playwright, director and performing arts professor. He studied directing at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg. Since 1994, he has written and directed productions for national and international theatres and festivals, including Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Münchner Kammerspiele, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin, Royal Dramatic Theatre Stockholm, Théâtre National de l’Odéon Paris, International Theatre Amsterdam, Théâtre National de Bruxelles, Ruhrtriennale, Salzburg Festival and Festival d’Avignon.
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Richter has been a regular director at the Schaubühne in Berlin since 2000. Among his best-known works are Gott ist ein DJ (1999), Electronic City (2002), Unter Eis (2004), TRUST (2009) and Small Town Boy (2013), which have been translated into more than 35 languages and performed worldwide. He has been a regular guest at the Theatertreffen and Mülheimer Theatertage festivals. In 2014, he received the Friedrich Luft Prize for Best Production for The Disconnected Child at the Schaubühne. In 2016, he was appointed to the fifth Chair of Dramatic Poetry at Saarbrücken University.
In 2018, he was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. That same year, he was invited to the Theatertreffen with his production of Am Königsweg by Elfriede Jelinek at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. He was named Director and Production of the Year by Theater Heute magazine, and received the Special Teddy Award at the Berlinale.
In 2024, Falk Richter was promoted to the rank of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and he was once again invited to both the Theatertreffen and the Mülheimer Theatertage with his play The Silence.
Actor Dimitrij Schaad received several awards for his portrayal of Falk Richter in the autofictional production The Silence, including Actor of the Year 2024 (Theater Heute).
In September 2024, Richter premiered his own adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.
