The Mission (Der Aufrag)

In “The Mission” by the German playwright, Heiner Müller, three young Frenchmen arrive in Jamaica circa 1800 charged with organizing a slave uprising and establishing a new system of governance in line with the model provided by the French Revolution. However, Napoleon’s ascent to the French throne ushers in an unexpected turn of events. This deeply moving and profoundly poetic text on faith, friendship, love, betrayal, ideology and power bears all the hallmarks of late Müller: a collage of disparate materials, a fragmentary narrative, a range of styles, the artful interweaving of historical past and contemporary reality. In “The Mission”, Müller—although apparently talking about the European Enlightenment—is actually creating a monumental discourse on the failure of revolutions. Written in 1979 in East Germany, the text is often interpreted—like the rest of the playwright’s work—as a critique of Real Socialism.

However, since it examines ideas bequeathed to the contemporary world by the French Revolution, the work is eminently suited to a staging in Greece, another nation born of a revolution inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment. In this, the Greek première of “The Mission”, the young director, Anestis Azas, and his equally youthful cast draw material from personal biography and collective experience as they seek to explore through Müller’s text what revolution might mean in the constantly changing society of Greece today.