DIE HEILIGE JOHANNA DER SCHLACHTHÖFE

About the show

Chicago 1930: the cattle market is controlled by Mauler, the "meat king", the factories are closed. Johanna Dark wants to help the hungry workers, she wants to know who’s to blame for their misery. In her three visits "to the depths", she meets Mauler and believes she can convert him to humanity. At first, he plans to open the factories again, give the workers wages and bread again. But Johanna has been misled. The cold, the poverty and the hunger of the workers – Mauler is willing to accept all this when he sees a chance to blackmail the other meat factory owners. Johanna realises that only "violence helps where violence rules"! But her voice can no longer be heard, it is now drowned out by the songs of the capitalists, in which they declare her a martyr now that she has failed, declare her their "Saint Joan of the Stockyards". Bertolt Brecht wrote the play between 1929 and 1931, in the midst of the global economic crisis and the mass unemployment that resulted from it. It is one of a series of plays and fragments, in which Brecht examines financial speculation with essential goods. The two characters at the centre of the play bound in a Faustian pact, Johanna and Mauler, are played by women, Kathleen Morgeneyer and Stefanie Reinsperger, in this production directed by the Czech director Dušan David Pařízek.