Pieter de Buysser — Immerwahr

On 2 May 1915 Fritz Haber returned home from Ypres. He had seen one of his inventions being successfully put to use: chlorine gas as a weapon of mass destruction. A party was given in his honour. His wife Clara Immerwahr, a brilliant physicist herself, found her husband's invention a perversion of science. After the party she shot and killed herself with her husband's service revolver. She died in the arms of her thirteen-year-old son. Haber's invention was put to use after WWI too, in fertilizer (which enabled Bayer to grow into an industrial giant), as Zyklon B in WWII, etc. This also marked the start of a culture that eliminated the unique human bodily presence through mass production and also through endless repetition in image and sound recordings.

The theatre-maker and writer Pieter de Buysser, together with Maike Lond, created a performance inspired by the life of Clara Immerwahr. About gas and the disappearance of hand-to-hand combat, about the physical and the unaccountable, about mass production and mass destruction.

"Always there was that black magnet that holds everything together: in the dark they played Klara Immerwahr,
a  game of annihilition, a back to zero.
There was nothing good to be found in it, nor something bad.  
It was the total destruction of what they’ve built up,
everytime again.
Endgame and going on,
the game of the naked beginning, and going on,
endgame and going on,
the game of naked beginning,
and going on."

Concept & Performers: Pieter De Buysser & Maike Lond
Text: Pieter De Buysser
Sounddesign: Lauri-Dag Tüür
Dramaturgy: Esther Severi
Scenography & technician: Herman Sorgeloos
English Language Coaching: Miles O'Shea
Production: Hiros
Co-production: Kaaitheater, Kanuti Gildi SAAL (Tallinn)
With the support of: The Government of Flanders, The Estonian ministry of culture & Flemish Literature Fund.
A House On Fire Project, with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

Premiere: 10.03.2015 - 11.03.2015, Kaaistudio's, Brussels


Performer and writer Pieter De Buysser has become one of the key international artists to have found a home and an audience at the Archa Theatre. He appeared before a Prague audience for the first time four years ago together with Canadian performer Jacob Wren in An Anthology of Optimism. He has staged his first solo show Book Burning at Archa three times already and in March he will present it a fourth time. The Archa Theatre has co-produced his latest theatrical meditation on the character of people who have changed the world entitled Landscape with Skiproads. With Estonian artist Maike Lond he has now created a production inspired by the life of Clara Immerwahr. This performance about a deadly gas and the limitations of hand to hand combat, about the physical, the ungraspable, mass production and mass destruction will be presented by Archa a mere week after the Brussels premiere.