Globalisation, communication, digitalisation, standardisation, disorientation … disintegration.
Electronic City by Falk Richter, allegedly one of the most important German playwrights of his generation, is a burgeoning, all encompassing, uber techno metropolis where flexibility and resilience is paramount for success and survival. However, despite all the technology we have at our disposal that is supposed to make the world a smaller place – it in fact isolates us.

Wayne Pearn, Hoy Polloy artistic director and Electronic City director, explains that for
every connection we make there is a disconnect …" Openness is a cocoon – we lose our senses. In Electronic City the corporates, in the relentless quest for profit, are reshaping the planet into a balance sheet and woe betide anyone who has missed a place on the global conveyor belt – you’re disposable.” .
Daniel Brunet, Electronic City translator, explains, “If we are to believe Shakespeare, one of theatre’s primary functions is ‘… to hold a mirror up to nature…’, providing artists and audience alike the opportunity to reflect on the world around them or, as Falk Richter so succinctly puts it in the subtitle of Electronic City, “unsere Art zu leben’ (‘our way of living’).”
“Indeed, as the world continues to move towards ever-more pervasive digitisation and globalisation, humanity’s current ‘way of living’ seems to differentiate itself from what has come before in a shocking manner.”

“With Electronic City, Richter throws all of this into question: Is humanity the master or the servant of technology? What is the human cost of round-the-clock accessibility? Can the digital realm, with its inherent malleability, be trusted as instinctually as the analog? These are questions well worth asking,” Brunet concluded.
Hoy Polloy present, as part of Berlin Dayz by the Goethe-Institut Australien, Falk Richter’s Electronic City translated by Daniel Brunet and directed by Wayne Pearn at MIPAC – Brunswick, November 2010.