Falk Richter’s latest piece, titled in English although staged principally in German, was originally announced as Fear And Identity. Perhaps it was felt that the longer title sounded too earnest; it would, however, have fitted the material. For, just as keeping a straight face is not the same as taking a subject seriously, so a succession of wacky postures, utterances and routines do not stop an approach from being essentially po-faced. Richter’s method is broadly postdramatic: he is more concerned with eliciting a response from the audience than with saying something in particular. Fear also demonstrates that mentioning something a lot is not the same as talking about it.

His performers move around a multi-level, multi-space stage, festooning it and themselves with photocopied images of slogans from various contemporary right-wing parties and movements in Germany and Austria. They talk about fear of immigrants, fear of the broadening of gender categories (a recent German law permits newborn children to be registered provisionally as being of indeterminate sex), and even of the fear that you might not love me at this instant as much as you did a moment ago; about zombies, Virginia Woolf and True Detective; they lampoon a right-wing German MEP (fulfilling Godwin’s Law by mentioning her ancestor who served in Hitler’s cabinet) and conventional notions of glamour. They engage in conventional physical-theatre fight/movement sequences, a reflective musical number or two and a spot of gardening (I’m not joking). Bjørn Melhus, apparently one of Germany’s foremost video artists, screens a narrow, repetitious and derivative selection of images on the back wall.

And none of it goes any way towards achieving Richter’s professed intention of examining the extent to which fear is now a pervasive and defining part of our 21st-century lives. As so often with pieces which take such an approach, it’s not a matter of demanding that it provide answers so much as hoping forlornly that an at least semi-articulated question might crop up at some point. No such luck. This, we are implicitly told, is what we do; the how and why of it remain elusive. The first 15 minutes set out Richter’s stall fairly comprehensively; the following hour and a half are redundant.

Written for the Financial Times.