In the Krug staged by Wilke Weermann at Theater Münster, Kleist’s material is not treated as a legacy to preserve, but as a tragic mechanism to be reactivated. The broken jug – a minimal yet absolute object – is no longer a mere dramaturgical pretext, but an epiphany of a symbolic order in ruins. What shatters here is not just a pot: it is the very illusion that justice can justify itself.

Judge Adam, already an ambivalent figure in Kleist, now appears as the decaying body of authority: dragged onstage with a bruised back of the head, without wig and without shame, he embodies a power that has lost all transcendent foundation and clings to the bare form of procedure in order to survive. But what happens in this room-turned-courtroom is more than farce: it is the autopsy of a jurisdiction that no longer judges but merely repeats itself, like a hollow ritual.

At the center of this void, the figure of Eve emerges not as a passive object of desire and suspicion, but as a fragile threshold between silence and speech. In her resides the unbearable tension between lived truth and codified language: she has endured abuse, witnessed the inversion of roles, and touched the impunity of the guilty. What Weermann’s direction makes radical is the moment Eve speaks – not as accusation, but as a rupture in the symbolic order. This is where the stage implodes. This is where the text disarticulates.

Theater, in its most essential form, becomes immanent judgment: no longer a representation of a trial, but the trial itself. The stripped-down set, the icy lighting, the anachronistic costumes – all contribute to collapsing the distance between fiction and reality, between the drama’s “there” and the spectator’s “now.” Kleist’s Utrecht becomes everywhere; the patriarchal customary law, which Weermann deconstructs with subtle ferocity, still inhabits our present.

There is no redemption in this interpretation. Adam is not punished, and this is no narrative oversight, but a diagnosis of our time: injustice requires no justification – habit is enough. Yet in the wound opened by Eve – in her now-uncontainable voice – another possibility emerges: that of a justice not aligned with the law, and of a truth that does not ask permission to exist.

Der zerbrochne Krug thus becomes a tragedy of law and language: a place where laughter dies at the threshold of horror, and where judgment, finally, passes into the hands of the audience. Those who saw, those who stayed silent, those who laughed – no one is innocent.

Dates can be found on the website: https://www.theater-muenster.com/produktionen/der-zerbrochne-krug-749.html