Boris Nikitin - Versuch über das Sterben

On Dying is a spare, autobiographical monologue. And a challenge. Boris Nikitin, the author, director and performer, offers it to the audience almost like a provocation, asking it and himself whether a performance like this is tenable, if going on stage in jeans and a T-shirt, armed only with a few sheets of paper can be enough: “I bet that eliminating every element of theatre could generate great theatre” writes the author and director in his notes. And thus Nikitin, born in Basel, the son of migrants with mixed Ukrainian-Slovakian-French-Jewish origins, walks onto the stage, sits on a chair and begins to read. With little inflection, his voice describes the last months of his father, who died of ALS in 2016.  Nikitin reflects upon his own emotions and his father’s disease becomes an opportunity to embark on a journey to discover himself and his history. “After this last intense year with my father – explains Nikitin, I felt the need to cry out to the world that sometimes the presence of a person, his story, his voice, are enough”. Written in the first person in the present tense, the text, which sometimes directly addresses the audience, is a hymn to vulnerability and to the capacity to “say things in public”, even the most controversial.