A play about fascism sparks violent scenes in German theater Germany

An actor in a theater in Germany over the weekend was shouted at, pelted with fruit and attempted to storm the stage while delivering a final monologue in character as a far-right activist.

The scenes of violence came on Saturday during the German premiere of the play Katarina, or the Beauty of Killing Fascists, by Portuguese playwright Thiago Rodriguez in Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia.

The provocative, award-winning play from 2020 tells the story of a family with a horrific annual tradition: to avenge the murder of farm worker Catarina Eufemia, a real-life resistance martyr who was shot and killed in 1954 during Salazar’s dictatorship, they kidnap a “fascist” every year in order to execute him during a family feast.

The course of the play witnesses an intergenerational conflict between bloodthirsty parents and their more sensitive adult daughter over the justifiable means of defending democracy. At the end of the final act, this year’s chosen victim, an employee of a far-right party, delivers a 15-minute monologue laying out a nightmarish extremist agenda.

Theater spokesman Alexander Kraus said that when actor Uli Lagerbusch began making inflammatory speech, the audience became increasingly agitated.

At first, people started whistling and heckling, insulting Lagerbusch and urging him to stop. An orange was thrown at the actor, narrowly missing him.

Some of the audience then got out of their seats, Cross said. “Moreover, two spectators stepped onto the stage, apparently with the intention of pulling [the] The actor was outside the theater, which was prevented,” he said, describing the assault as “completely unacceptable.”

Martin Krumbolz, of the cultural website Nachtkritik.de, who was at the Bochum Schauspielhaus to review the play, said Lagerbusch persevered despite the hostile reaction and was able to deliver his chilling final phrase: “The future belongs to us.”

Renowned Slovenian theater director Matej Kolenic said by phone from Ljubljana that she was “incredibly proud” of Lagerbusch, and condemned the “stupidity” and brutality of the onlookers’ attack.

“For me, it was a huge shock – we expected people to react, even scream, because the last monologue was, of course, a provocation,” she said.

She said Lagerbusch, whom she described as “shocked,” was so effective in the role because he spoke softly and was even gentle in conveying his hateful and divisive message.

“[But] I was really amazed at the stupidity. “I never thought — no one ever thought — that someone in the audience would jump on stage and try to hit the actor… I would expect this from the people we vote against, but not from the people who should be on our side.”

Kolenik said her goal with the production was not to make “liberal and petty-bourgeois society in Europe feel good” about the consensus in condemning intolerance, but to leave them afraid.

“The next wave of fascism, there will be no monsters. There will be normal, nice people,” she said.

Critic Christoph Ohrim of regional public broadcaster WDR attended the premiere and released a short audio recording of the disturbance, which he said recalled something of Shakespeare’s era.

He noted that Rodriguez’s piece often elicited intense reactions from audiences and concluded that it was a “good play” to take the spectators out of their comfort zone. “It’s really surprising that the play can still elicit these reactions in 2026,” he said. Rodriguez said he intends to create a buzz with the play.

In his review, Krumbolz blamed the commotion on spectators. “Some of the Bochum audience, which one would have thought were among the most theater-intelligent audiences in the country, seem too stupid, to put it bluntly, to distinguish between fiction and fact,” he said.

People expressed their support for the theater in Bochum on their Instagram page, with one commenter noting that the subsequent screening, with tight security and deputy director Angela Obst’s appeal for calm, went ahead without incident.

Another spectator of Saturday’s debacle said she was “shocked at how disrespectful some people were in the theater” when “the actor was just doing his job.”

A third called it “scary” when “anti-fascist theatergoers storm the stage and attack the actors. This is basically a fascist attitude towards art and theater and, in my opinion, should never happen.”

Rodriguez’s play won several awards including Best Foreign Performance at the Italian Ubu Awards and the equivalent award from the French Critics Union.