Michael Kohlhaas

Kleist's horse dealer is wronged in a small way, is refused redress at every level of a legal system that should have been routine, and answers with fire. The house does not soften the arc: the victim becomes the perpetrator, and the destruction he sets off reaches far past the men who cheated him. Its own billing calls the material one of the most intense violent fantasies in German literature and argues it has lost none of its currency — above all in what upheaval does to the people least able to absorb it. Two actors and projected images carry it, and it comes round rarely.