I have every right to rage at nature, and upon my honour, vouch to show it. Wasn’t it she who abandoned us naked and destitute on the shores of this great ocean of life? Swim if you can, she said, and if you are too ungainly ‒ sink! I was given nothing. What I wish to make of myself is therefore my concern. We all have equal rights to great and lesser things. So hop to it! I intend to root out everything that limits me, all things I am not master of. For master I must be to get those things with violence that tenderness deprived me of. Franz Moor The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller

Young men from a certain background are the latest threat to German society in its battle to defend Western civilization. They spread fear and violence and their background is usually migrant, Muslim or uneducated. This source of fear and anger also sometimes strikes roots, preferably Arab or Turkish ones. Then these young men force their wives to wear headscarves and kill their sisters in the name of their family’s honour. And instead of getting an education and working these anti-integrationists continuously procreate and produce more girls with headscarves! Such are the salacious clichés that are bandied about in the current “debate on Islam”. The only hope of salvation is that tried and trusted German formula of education, education, education!

One day, one of these teachers and saviours of the nation gets a unique opportunity to take a stance: while trying to introduce Friedrich Schiller and his idealistic visions of classic German theatre to a bunch of rowdy youths from a migrant background a fight erupts and a gun ends up in the teacher’s hands. A real gun. After a brief moment of hesitation, she takes her students hostage and forces them up onto the school stage to act out the play at gunpoint. For theatre, she reasons, is the only cure for the ills of this world. This hostage-taking drama liberally swerves between the genres of thriller, comedy and melodrama, and sets about deconstructing seemingly clear-cut identities with a vicious energy and humour.

The young director Nurkan Erpulat and curator and producer Shermion Langhoff began their successful cooperation in 2006 with productions including Faked, Jenseits ‒ Bist du schwul oder bist du Türke?, Schattenstimmen and most recently Lö Bal Almanya. For the beyond belonging ‒ translokal festival at the HAU and the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Nurkan Erpulat directed Man braucht keinen Reiseführer für ein Dorf, das man sieht from a text by a Tim Staffel. Verrücktes Blut is a co-production with Ruhr Triennial Arts Festival.

The season’s winner! ‒ Wolfang Höbel. Der Spiegel

As breathtakingly clever and funny as an evening at the theatre could possibly be. ‒ Peter Raue, Bild-Zeitung

Better than Hollywood! ‒ Student of the Kurt Löwenstein Secondary School

(…) a stunning piece of craftsmanship by the young director Erpulat. ‒ Patrick Wildermann, Der Tagesspiegel

Verrücktes Blut (Crazy Blood) is a piece for our times: playfully packed with social explosives, director Nurkan Erpulat and dramaturge Jens Hillje transplant Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s film La Journée de la Jupe from the French banlieus to Berlin, creating something marvellously new in the process. ‒ Andreas Rossmann, Frankfurter Allgemine Zeitung

Nurkan Erpulat and his young team of actors will be remembered for this supremely intense production above and beyond the Ruhr Triennale. ‒ Thomas Becker, Westfälische Rundschau