"Paradise" by Thomas Köck | flooding/starving/playing

“Paradise” isn’t just another performance – it’s a scathing planetary evacuation alert. Don’t try to help anyone else. Think only of yourselves. You know you can.

Look to the future, because that’s where this performance is coming to you from. Presented for the first time in Greece, Austrian playwright Thomas Köck’s award-winning “Klimatrilogie” (“Climate Trilogy”) – a tragicomic, charged, and outraged requiem – talks bluntly about the loss of planet Earth. In her “Paradise”, Katerina Giannopoulou imagines a not-so-distant future where the remnants of Western civilization rewrite their own history – on the Onassis Stegi Upper Stage, from October 29 to November 7 – and urge us to laugh at the tragedy of our situation. With a strange greenhouse set center stage, and soundscapes created by Yannis Veslemes (Felizol) making the atmosphere electric, “Paradise” is like an episode of a post-apocalyptic dystopian television series, yet is also a raging political farce that takes us on a journey from the Amazon to Athens, from the 19th century to the 22nd, and from faith in civilization to the admission of crimes committed in its name.

A young German architect roams the paradise that is the Amazon and watches the construction of a European-style opera house in the Brazilian city of Manaus, built using revenues from the rubber boom. A car mechanic devastated by the financial crisis in Greece struggles to make ends meet as the world’s oceans are destroyed by plastic waste. A little before everyone and everything is submerged underwater, history puts in an appearance once more, accompanied by fragmentary recollections of a paradise lost that was first conquered by colonialism, then ripped out, roots and all, by global markets. It is the story of nature’s exploitation.

The work’s surging language – a flood in and of itself – brings relics of rampant capitalist consumption onto the stage in waves, washing away the history, the present, and the future of humankind in a satirical frenzy.

Taking inspiration from the sweeping “Climate Trilogy” that Thomas Köck – one of the most important playwrights of the younger generation – wrote about the environmental destruction of planet Earth, this up-and-coming director sets out a timeline of events that refute capitalist modes of production.

How close are we to irreversible environmental damage? And, moreover, how did we arrive at this point? The sun now shines forty percent hotter and floodwaters have covered the entire surface of the Earth, carrying off the few remaining survivors, who float in among the trash, amid their memories and thwarted hopes. A furious mob from the future appears before us to mourn our lost paradise.