BERLIN — By the end of the second act of “The Weight of Water,” the actors are standing in it up to their knees. By the end of the third, they are up to their chests, still arguing about a planning permit. That the audience is still laughing is the first miracle of Ilse Marquardt’s new play. That the laughter turns, without any visible transition, into something closer to grief is the second.
Ms. Marquardt, 44, has written six plays for German-language stages, most of them tight domestic pieces performed in living rooms built to the millimeter. This one, which opened at the Schaubühne on Friday under the direction of Yannick Obermaier, is her first at scale, and the scale is the point. The set, by Hanne Vogt, is a sunken rectangular basin that occupies the entire stage. It begins dry. Water enters through drains in the floor during the first scene, so slowly that for 20 minutes you are not sure it is happening.
The story is deliberately small. A town council in an unnamed river valley meets to discuss a flood-protection wall. The mayor, played by Carsten Hübner with the wounded patience of a man who has been right too often, wants to build it. The owner of the campground that the wall would destroy, played by Nadja Steinbach, does not. A hydrologist from the state capital, an engineer from a construction firm, and a retired schoolteacher who has lived through two floods complete the council. They talk. The water rises.
What makes the play remarkable is that it never becomes an allegory, or rather that it becomes one only in the audience’s head. Nobody on stage mentions the water. Ms. Marquardt’s characters are too busy with the real business of local politics: the grant deadline, the surveyor’s error, the campground owner’s late husband, who was once the mayor’s best friend. The dialogue has the overlapping, half-finished texture of actual meetings, and Mr. Obermaier’s staging lets it run at the pace of life rather than theater.
Ms. Steinbach gives the performance of the evening. Her campground owner is not a victim and not a saint; she is a woman who has done the math and knows that the wall would protect 3,000 people and ruin her. In a long scene near the end of the second act, she reads the council the insurance letter that will, in effect, decide the matter, and her voice does not break once. It is the water that does the breaking, lapping against the table as she reads.
The production is not flawless. The third act, in which the characters are forced to stand on chairs and eventually on the table itself, pushes the image further than it needs to go, and a late monologue for the hydrologist, played with great care by Olek Nowicki, explains what the play has already shown. At three hours and ten minutes, with one intermission, it is 20 minutes longer than it should be.
But the final image, which I will not describe, earns every minute before it. The theater’s technical director told me the basin holds 48,000 liters and takes 40 minutes to drain. On Friday night the audience stayed for most of that, standing, in the half-light, watching the water go down.
“The Weight of Water” runs through Jan. 31 at the Schaubühne, Berlin, with English surtitles on Thursdays and Sundays. Running time: 3 hours 10 minutes.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section C, Page 2 of the European edition with the headline: Review: In Berlin, a Play About a Flood Becomes a Play About Everything We Refuse to See.
