Die Brüder Karamasow is an exorbitant text in which one can lose oneself like in a forest at night. EVERYTHING is in it: the longing for love and the agony of desire, moral guilt and economic debt, violence and prayers and furtive kisses, reaching for the stars and falling into the void. A multitude of unhoused figures chase around like in a fever dream, incessantly on the move, both externally and internally, out of step, their balance gone, if they ever had it. Everything is displaced, out of control: adults are dancing on a knife's edge and pale children want to set the world on fire. When there is nothing left to lose, is everything permitted?

The plot could be boiled down to a lurid sex and crime story: At the centre are the Karamazows, a broken family based on dead mothers, all of whom suffered at the hands of their morally depraved father, Fjodor Karamazow, leaving behind four sons. The novel covers only a few days, when the father and his sons all clash again after years. When Fjodor is found murdered, each of the sons has a motive for the crime. But only one did it, and another is believed to be the murderer. Of course, money plays a role. And of course the most important driving force behind the events is (at least) one woman.

But Dostojewskij's characters reach into our souls not because of the complex criminal story or one of the most famous judicial errors in literary history. Rather, because they wonder, in all their contradictoriness but always at the top of their lungs, where freedom is to be found, and yet know nothing to do with it. Because they sweep the heavens empty and yet imploringly seek God. Because they love life and wish it to hell the next moment. Just like us. We take over the theatre with Dostojewskij's characters: stage, backstage and auditorium. A production lasting several hours, on the big stage of the Schauspielhaus and in the Kammerspiele, in corridors and foyers – a journey, a spectacle, a celebration, a haunting.