The Last Night of the World (DSE) | The Last Night of the World | by Laurent Gaudé

Winning piece of the 2023 drama competition at the Science Dome of experimenta The world is on the brink of significant changes: the night as a period of rest for humans and animals is abolished. From now on, there will be 24 hours of activity in the working and business world. The German-language premiere of the play "The Last Night of the World" by the French bestselling author Laurent Gaudé has been postponed from March 1, 2025, to November 19, 2025. The venue will be the Science Dome of experimenta in Heilbronn. The production directed by Elias Perrig will thus be the opening premiere of the next "Science & Theatre" festival, which will take place from November 19 to 23, 2025, as a collaboration between Theater Heilbronn and experimenta. The world is on the brink of significant changes: the night as a period of rest for humans and animals is abolished. From now on, there will be 24 hours of activity in the working and business world. Everyone takes a short individual time window for sleep. However, thanks to a new medication, this only lasts 45 minutes. After three-quarters of an hour of sleep, people feel as rested as they normally would after seven or eight hours of nighttime rest. This means that each person has nearly twice as long an active lifespan, as they no longer need to sleep as much. They can achieve almost twice as much. The productivity of society, indeed of all humanity, grows immeasurably, as there are no longer any time differences to consider. What a revolution! Gabor, a protagonist of this turning point, must travel to the other end of the world on the last proper night before the introduction of the day without night to accompany the abolition there. His wife Lou, who was injured during violent riots of the "Black Night Movement" against this societal transformation, is in the hospital and asks her husband to stay. Nevertheless, Gabor flies. Thousands of kilometers away from her, he receives a call from the hospital, urging him to come immediately if he wants to see Lou alive again. But due to the global system change, no flights are available on the "last night." However, Gabor pays a high price for his belief in progress, not only in his relationship. The whole world is changing under the dictate of relentless growth and ever-increasing productivity, which attempts to completely override the laws of nature. The highly renowned author Laurent Gaudé, who has received numerous awards in France, has consistently thought through common procedures and thought experiments from economics, medicine, and society to their logical conclusions. His vision of the future is technically conceivable. But Gaudé questions its impact on humanity and nature and discusses whether everything that scientific research could enable must actually be implemented. "The Last Night of the World" is the winning piece of the third drama competition "Science & Theatre" and will have its German-language premiere at the Science Dome of experimenta. Dr. Mirjam Meuser, the curator of the "Science & Theatre" festival, said in her laudation: "In five acts, Gabor explores, through leaps in time, the tragic submission to the gods of capitalism and its intrinsic motivation to transform humans into a working machine that can be deployed around the clock... 'The Last Night of the World' poetically and parabolically investigates what happens to us when we produce without rest for 24 hours and drive the exploitation of ourselves and nature to the absolute."