The Robbers of Hearts

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The Robbers are gangsters. The betray their ideals, which are to stand up for the poor and oppressed, and they steal gold and horses instead, they take freely from civilization and nature. In his first play, in a social structure that has got out of control, Friedrich Schiller confronts the arbitrariness of the state and addresses ‘evil’, searching for tipping points in which fundamental values such as freedom, justice and respect are betrayed.
In his adaptation of the play, Bonn Park is interested in a utopia, a feeling we long for, a cut between the past and the present, in which beauty and new ideas replace bad-temperedness. Schiller’s figures are united by the desire to know themselves and, in the happy-end version, to know who they could be: the better Robbers. These Robbers shine, they are friendlier than ever, and only commit the right crimes. They let others finish their sentences, respect the people who are never respected, and hunt down those who refuse to live in flawless magic.
Born in 1987, director and dramatist Bonn Park studied Creative Writing for the Stage at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2010. At the same time, he started showing his first works at the Volksbühne Berlin. His plays have often won prizes, most recently the world premiere of »Three Billion Sisters« at the Volksbühne Berlin in 2018. For this work he was awarded the Friedrich-Luft-Preis and voted Young Director of the Year 2019 by the Theater Heute Critics’ Survey. This is Bonn Park’s first production for the Deutsches SchauSpielHaus.