“The Handmaid’s Tale” as an opera in Freiburg: Subjugation of women

You could easily mistake all these images for hell on earth: dead animals, the storming of the Capitol, houses bombed by the war. After such images have flashed past you, the horror in the Freiburg Theater is still not over. Based on the 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood – and in the shadow of evangelical and Islamist fanatics of our day – the future of a crude theocracy unfolds on stage. Its main subjects are women. Many of them have lost their fertility after nuclear contamination, so those who are still able to have children are forcibly recruited. Like the protagonist Offred (Inga Schäfer). Like many others, she was separated from her husband and child in order to bear a child as a “handmaid” for her new master.