Johnny’s Jihad

Year & Context

2009

18th Production

About the Production

JOHNNYS JIHAD draws on a real case: in late 2001, John Walker Lindh, a twenty-year-old American citizen from San Francisco, was captured by US forces in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban. How did the son of liberal parents come to convert to Islam, study Arabic and the Koran in Yemen, and travel to Afghanistan as Suleyman? That is the question playwright Marc Pommerening pursues in his chamber play, commissioned by the Kunstfest Weimar in 2004 and given a revised staging by THEATER DER KLÄNGE in 2009.

The piece compresses the material into three figures and three relationships to freedom: John – raised in the freest circumstances imaginable – has fled from freedom into the certainties of faith. Special Forces agent Dave Tyson – a defender of freedom – orders torture to protect it. General Dostum – contemptuous of both freedom and faith – plays the two against each other to rule by a permanent state of exception. Written in blank verse that carries the memory of Shakespeare: language, sustained by Indian tabla percussion, becomes music.

The production toured to the FFT-Kammerspiele Düsseldorf, the Lutherkirche Köln-Südstadt, the Katakomben Theater Essen and Splügen in Switzerland – and to Düsseldorf’s JVA prison: a piece about the loss of freedom, performed for an audience that knows what that means.

“Was a prisoner in the free world – Freedom is a nothing / That means nothing to me.” — Marc Pommerening, Johnny’s Jihad

Funded by the Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf and the Stiftung van Meeteren. In co-production with FFT Düsseldorf.