About the work
Ach, Mom! is a stage work by the composer and director Nico Sauer that moves between spoken theatre, opera and performance and carries the subtitle “a non-Euclidean soap opera”. Sauer submitted it together with the stage designer Maria Magdalena Emmerig to the first open call of Deutsches Theater Berlin, which in 2025 invited proposals for a production in its Box studio; from nearly 300 anonymous submissions a jury of staff from different departments chose the concept in two rounds. The world premiere, directed by Sauer himself, opened in the Box on 17 April 2026 with a cast of four.
Plot
The evening starts as a family sitcom in a living room, shot as if by several studio cameras, and gradually abandons this familiar order. Instead of a continuous plot it uses methods borrowed from composition: glances, gestures and everyday routines are repeated, layered and shifted against each other, the performers sometimes speak themselves and sometimes only mouth along to recorded voices, and the camera becomes a player in its own right. “Non-Euclidean” stands for a way of storytelling in which scenes return in loops, spaces fold into one another and time does not run in a straight line. At its core the piece is about family relationships and trust.
Cultural significance
Ach, Mom! emerged as the winning project of the first open call with which Deutsches Theater Berlin invited proposals for a production in the Box. After its premiere in April 2026 the production remained in the Box repertoire in the 2026/27 season.