Quartet at Video Cabaret

Content Warnings:
Explicit Images
Simulated Sex and Kink
Violent and Sexually Explicit Language
Simulated Blood
Flashing Lights
References to Death/Sickness/Suicide
Who will you be, and who will you be with, after the end?
QUARTET is a play written by Heiner Muller, and translated into english by Marc Von Henning, inspired  
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Liasons Dangereuse. In a space that is equal parts “a drawing room before  
the French revolution/ an air raid shelter after WWIII”, two people remain: the Marquise de Merteuil (M)  
and the Vicomte de Valmont (V). Through a series of role-playing games they move fluidly across gender,  
age and identity, while the spectre of death, both inside and outside their private world, looms large.
In this new production, Other Hearts re-examines this work through the lens of kink, queer intimacy and  
contemporary crisis. We treat M and V as the last two survivors of an unnamed catastrophe, seeking to  
pass the endless hours through the fetishization of a world they never really knew. This fetish goes  
beyond Muller’s script to include 20th century pop music, comic books and p*rnography, explored  
through various interstitial scenes to create space around Muller’s infamously dense text. These games  
are colored by the wasted landscape outside, and by the wasting body of M, whose sickness becomes  
increasingly apparent as the work progresses.