Concept Page [de]
FEED | The Opera
Structure
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The Devil’s Kitchen breaks down into five acts and has a circular narrative structure (it has no beginning and no end).
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Concept Page [de]
ACT I |
introduces our protagonists – the technocrat (Kantian duty ethics), the entrepreneur (ethical egoism), the activist (Schopenhauer's metaphysics of will) and the politician (virtue ethics) – and shows how they slowly emerge from a state of total mental/spiritual breakdown as their characters gradually take shape.
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ACT II |
establishes the context of the work: a brutal world, filled with anger and hate, a world where Mephisto, our antagonist, freed of all constraints, can do whatever he likes. Our four heroes are increasingly horrified by this spectacle. They try to understand, want to help. Time and again they hear of a mysterious, long-lost ‘urtext’ of human coexistence and eventually set out in search of this text, in the hope of finding in it the answers that will allow them to lead humanity out of darkness into the light.
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ACT III |
shows how our protagonists, each for themselves, embark on their search for this urtext and how, along the way, their paths cross time and again. Since they approach this from very different perspectives, it becomes increasingly clear that they are looking for, and sometimes find in the form of fragments, very different kinds of texts. Act III then culminates in their ultimately futile attempt to combine their finds into a singular, unambiguous text.
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ACT IV |
follows our heroes as they, at first confidently, return to the place where they woke up (re/gained consciousness) in order to present their finds, their urtext, to humanity. But as before, Mephisto is also present and sows discord and confusion, so that both our heroes and their audience soon begin arguing about whose interpretation of these texts is ultimately the correct one.
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ACT V |
completes the vicious circle. The dispute escalates ever further until our protagonists, in utter desperation, finally fall back into a state of mental/spiritual disorder.
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