About the work
“Der Fall McNeal” is the German-language version of “McNeal”, a one-act play by the American playwright Ayad Akhtar, translated into German by Daniel Kehlmann. It premiered in 2024 in a Lincoln Center Theater production at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York: previews began on 5 September and the official opening followed on 30 September. Bartlett Sher directed, and Robert Downey Jr. made his Broadway debut in the title role.
Plot
Jacob McNeal is a celebrated American novelist who has long been considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and who drinks heavily. It is in the office of his doctor, who warns him that his liver is failing, that he learns he has won the prize. From then on his self-image begins to crack: his estranged son Harlan threatens to reveal that McNeal drew on his late wife's unpublished manuscript for his acclaimed novel, a New York Times journalist interviews him, and when he writes he has an AI chatbot, fed with classics and private notes, generate text in his own style.
Cultural significance
Using artificial intelligence as its lens, the play examines plagiarism, authorship and artistic integrity. Jeffrey Goldberg praised it in The Atlantic, which published the script in December 2024 with a foreword by Jeremy Strong, while other reviews were considerably more critical. The German-language premiere took place at Vienna's Burgtheater on 1 March 2025; further productions followed the same year, including in Düsseldorf and Berlin, and Theater heute printed Kehlmann's translation.