For us, it’s just a junction, a house by a river, a car with lane departure warning. For them, it’s numbers, foreseeable dangers, calculable risks.

The three largest reinsurance companies in the world are on our doorstep: Munich Re, Swiss Re and Hannover Re. Reinsurance companies are the insurance companies behind the insurance companies. They usually remain hidden because they do not directly affect individual citizens. And yet their vector arrows are constantly hovering around everything. This is where the big calculations are made, the risks weighed up, the final opponents localized; this is where the game is defined – and reality is constructed.

After Titanic II, the Markus&Markus Theaterkollektiv is now dealing with this calculated world in the second part of their documentary theater blockbuster trilogy, based on the Matrix universe. After Matrix (1999), Matrix Reloaded (2003), Matrix Revolutions (2003) and Matrix Resurrections (2021), here comes Matrix Reinsurance (2024).

Every successful blockbuster needs a second part to sink the first. For the Markus&Markus theater collective, that can only mean one thing: After the success of the U.S. feature film TITANIC, TITANIC II must hit the stage. The sequel is supposed to start where the film left off: at the bottom of the sea. So, it needs sand, lots and lots of sand.

The search for it leads the collective to a concrete plant, where they win tickets at a poker game for a trip to a place where sand is mined like there is no tomorrow. The consequences of this overexploitation are tangible. Mankind consumes twice as much sand each year as all the rivers supply. Created over thousands of years, sand is irreversibly bound into concrete in 90 minutes – which is as long as the condensed narrative of this theater production lasts.

TITANIC II is a collision course, a melodrama, a telegram from a sinking ship.

Dear program readers,

we are very happy to write to you today. In previous times we have built up pen-pal relationships with people who are in lifelong lockdown – in prison. Together with them we have worked on this production, to which we cordially invite you today. We have missed you.

Best wishes and take care, your Markus&Markus theater collective

Penthesilea, Judith, Clytemnestra, Medea, Lady Macbeth. Night after night, we let ourselves be sprinkled by their acts of violence enjoying the drama, murder and killing. If they were not trapped in Reclam books, they would probably be in prison. There, the Markus&Markus theater collective tracked down the – very real – protagonists of this evening for their new play and began to write them letters. The result is a pen-pal relationship with women who have been convicted of murder. In their inimitable form of documentary theater, which does not claim to be true to reality, Markus&Markus, together with their pen-pals, create an evening of theater that poses questions about humanity – and about second chances – in a new way.

It is one thing to pick up on current discourse and to share and expound your wisdom on stage, but it’s another thing, in times of hate and fear, to put up a resistance as activists on a grassroots level.

Markus&Markus tracked down activists, chronicled their actions on video and apprenticed with them.
Their stories now find their way out of the world and into the theatre. With a super-charged media environment saturated with music, videos and disruptive props, Die Berufung takes a hopeful journey across the Republic.

We are Markus&Markus. We are a part of the so-called German-German majority society. Theatre provides us with a means of examining specific issues not just from the outside but from within. BETWEEN THE PILLARS is a documentation of a journey into one of the Abrahamic religions, namely Islam. The piece is both fiction and reality, both status quo and utopia. It does not explain the world, it presents a world.

“Even outside the mosque it’s hard to find a place to stand because it’s so full. It is the night in which the quran was first revealed. There is a well outside, green lemonade spills out of it. “

“We are wearing earphones and strolling past the Mshatta façade of the caliphate’s palace in Amman, Jordan. In order to hear all the facts, we repeatedly press on the numbers of the audio tour guide because our concentration wanes. The museum guard warns us that the museum is about to close.”

“Markus shakes the hand of the Grand Mufti. And whilst some nuns head out to Sunday mass and the church bells ring out across town, the Muslim crowds get bread, sit in cafés, smoke shisha. We drink coffee from copper jugs. It is six in the morning. The party is about to start. Until late at night. With fireworks, music, balloons. Everyone is outside. The old town is covered in a haze of shisha smoke.”

BETWEEN THE PILLARS is a travel documentary, a treasure hunt with an unknown destination, in which we follow the lead of an unknown director.

Lisa, Jens and Pirmin are actors at the state theatre in Oldenburg. Markus&Markus are an independent theatre group. All of them spend most of their evenings working on – or backstage. They are celebrated or occasionally ripped apart for their Emilias and Romeos, their performances as Jens and Lisa, Markus and Dancing Death, Pirmin and Julia. But what exactly motivated them to go on stage in the first place? Who are they really? And what will happen to them after the last curtain falls?

Don’t expect a soppy Behind the Scenes-type story. This is a genuine search into the past and will lead us down unexpected depths, towards a battlefield of open wounds; it will lead us into places where reality and fiction are closer together than in our grandmothers’ fairy tales. We will seek out the place where it all began; namely Starnberg Lake. It is there that we stumbled upon a vast amount of unsettled debt, and we hope to settle this in our production once and for all, using everyone’s unique individual talents. We will settle old scores and demand revenge!

THE REVENGE is just a small extract from the biggest theatre production of all: There are 7 million people on this earth, and none of them are cast as extras in their own stories. Every single one of them is the main character in his or her own narrative.

A dramatic poem by Herbert (and Markus&Markus)

A person who is no longer able to grasp reality, who can no longer communicate properly, is at risk of being expelled from human society. Some philosophers even deny that dementia patients have person status. They see dementia as the transition process from human to thing. Dementia is  “someone“ turning into “something.“

We are Markus&Markus. We know that reality is a flexible construct. We trusted our Peer and followed him into his world. We walked along with him, along a road with no walls, no boundaries and where there is no looking back.

Peer Gynt is a brilliant dancer, a womaniser, a pilot, and he even knows how to use a machine gun. Peer is also king. King of Zootropolis. Peer has nine children, but he can’t meet them, because a wall has been erected around him. Peer Gynt is a dementia patient. The button-moulder wants to re-mould Peer’s soul into a grotesque lead figurine. He can avert this fate only if he can prove that he was truly himself throughout his life. But what is one’s true self? And what is true when a person is no longer able to define themselves anymore? Markus&Markus filmed their dementia protagonist for one whole summer.

A family drama in three acts with Margot and Markus&Markus.

In Ibsen’s play “Ghosts“ Oswald asks his mother to help him commit suicide. She is uncertain what to do. And like his mother, societies around the world are still questioning whether humans should have the right to determine when and how they want to die.

Markus&Markus met their own Oswald, the 81-year-old Margot on the 1st of April 2014 and followed her with their camera throughout her last days. We witnessed how she organised her belongings, her last visits to the doctor, and her goodbye parties. Finally we followed her to Switzerland. To Switzerland, where a handful of organisations provide assisted suicide in that very narrow legal space that the law grants them. On 22nd May 2014, we attended Margot’s funeral.

IBSEN:GHOSTS documents this special encounter. The piece is a celebration of life, a “Dinner for one“ in which the last lady at the table has already followed her dead friends. Only Markus&Markus are left on stage. And thus a controversial discourse crashes into a play in which the protagonist is already dead.

We don’t resolve the moral dilemma of assisted suicide; instead we ask yet more questions: What should and can a theatre production show, how true, how serious, how voyeuristic can and should we be? IBSEN:GHOSTS is a piece about dying, but it is also a life elixir, because :“As long as people talk about me, and tell my story, I am not dead.“

A domestic tragedy by Markus&Markus in collaboration with John Gabriel Borkman

Borkman is alive. We know, because we met him. This is not a modern, updated version of Ibsen’s play, this is a return: While Ibsen used a real biography as the basis for his main character, Markus&Markus did the reverse, they used the play to find the original character.

Borkman lost his job in 1982; he was one of the last miners to be employed in the mine shaft in Salzgitter. 1989 he took a job at AWD as a financial advisor, where he quickly climbed the career ladder. Then in 2002, he crashed. First he was sacked. Then came the demands to repay the provisions provided by his company; a five-digit sum. He was jailed, and upon his release he locked himself up in his house, and started to fill it slowly but surely, with memorabilia, curious collections and souvenirs. Tine Wittler would call him an obsessive-compulsive hoarder. But what is real in our protagonist? What is fiction? What part of him is perpetrator, what part is victim? Markus&Markus drive their audience into a category-crisis.

We are Markus&Markus. And we have a dream. We want to produce Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle. And finally we have found the perfect space where we have both enough time and room to realise this dream: a garage!

Markus spent large parts of his childhood in a garage, building model train sets with his grandpa. Grandma used to try to get them out of the garage to eat something, and grandpa would say: “we’ll be there in a minute”. Now grandpa is dead. But his model train set lives and now serves as a set for our tetralogy. We will perform the whole Ring Cycle, starting with a single tabletop and ending with the twilight of the Gods. Because we believe that whatever fits onto that green hill in Bayreuth, can also fit into a garage.

Emil runs two companies; in Mannheim he exports goods, and in Romania he imports them. In Mannheim Emil clears out and de-clutters households. He then packs all the stuff into a truck and drives everything down to Romania. To Ramnicu Valcea in Transylvania. There he sells these goods as “Made in Germany.”

Emil’s company is called “Stoica&Sons” because Emil’s two sons also used to work for him. The youngest got sick of hauling stuff around and is now studying for a phD. The eldest is working for another demolition company, which pays him a better wage.

We are Markus&Markus. Mannheim isn’t enough for us. Since we’re here to do THEATER DER WELT, we want to do real World Theatre. And that’s why we travelled to Romania.

We are Markus&Markus. But we are also Jesus. We can perform miracles and we have a mission. There is room for everyone in Polis3000, Christians and non-Christians! You are all part of our flock. “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.” (Luke 19, 27)

Polis3000:oratorio is a multi-media oratorio on institutionalised forms of the christian belief, and the inter-relationship of Church and State. Postscript: In this production we accused the pope, causing him to resign.

Markus&Markus are aliens visiting Earth to confront humanity with their self-image. Humans have sent their own vision of themselves out into space on the Voyager mission (in the form of music, text and images on golden CDs).

We, the aliens, have intercepted these CDs, films and radio signals and will now, together with the earthlings, evaluate whether they correspond to the actual situation we find here on Earth. We are very grateful to humanity for having built so-called theatres for us to use as landing docks and assembly rooms.

We are Markus&Markus, and we have our own distinct approach, which is wishy-washy! Polis3000 is an autonomous enclave, which exists beyond good and evil. Here we breed explosive experiences with theatrical benefits, using real-life materials. In this particular production we created a mixture of neo-agit-prop, documentary theatre and lecture-performance on the subject of everyday corruption in Germany. Our real life examples were Carsten Maschmeyer and the president of the University of Hildesheim, Wolfang-Uwe Friedrich. The latter sold the former an Honourary Doctorate. So we prosecuted them for title-dealing, bribery and corruptibility. Our mission is catharsis.