Mathias Tretter - Souverän

"Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception" - Carl Schmitt was quite the loudmouth too, otherwise he wouldn't have become Göring's egg liqueur. Germany's most notorious lawyer wrote that famous sentence in 1928, and we've been chewing on it ever since. Nearly a hundred years later, there's a state of exception on every corner - but who is sovereign?

Some say one thing, others say the people, and the truth lies somewhere else entirely. Mathias Tretter finds it once again with his friend Ansgar: "Being stoned is a state of exception, and I chose it for myself." Democracy may be gradually losing its grip on power, but that doesn't mean you have to lose self-control. Unless you piss yourself laughing - but isn't that the most sovereign thing of all?

"You will roar with laughter," says Tretter, who since the Salzburg Bull 2023 has finally been awarded every cabaret prize. Yet his newest piece is his funniest: "You will laugh, snort, gasp for breath, and leave invincible." In other words: sovereign. The name says it all.