POLARIS

About the show

“Nervous breakdown in Antarctica—Russian researcher stabs colleague,” read the headline in Fokus magazine in October 2018. Both men, Oleg B. and Sergei S., were avid readers, filling the long hours in the Antarctic solitude with books. One day, Oleg revealed the ending of a book to his colleague, who then stabbed him with a knife, causing life-threatening injuries. What initially sounds like an unusual dispute over books and spoilers reveals a complex story about human limits in the infinite vastness of Antarctica. As a stateless “no man's land,” Antarctica is one of the last shared spaces of humanity that is still largely untouched by humans. Its undisturbed natural state offers exceptional conditions for scientific research and international cooperation. However, Antarctica has become fragile in a new age of imperialism. Therefore, it is not only ecologically but also politically a special, utopian place. In January 2026, director Jan-Christoph Gockel, who most recently staged the acclaimed theater marathon Hospital der Geister (Hospital of Ghosts) at the DT, will travel to Neumayer Station III in Antarctica with documentary filmmaker Lion Bischof and actors Julia Gräfner and Wolfram Koch to investigate the crime in this unique landscape. The journey culminates in a surreal mockumentary theater piece between fiction and cinematic documentary, in which the white landscape of Antarctica becomes not only a map of storytelling, but also a mirror of the human soul.