The Mission (play)

Composed with a "collage-like" dramaturgical structure, the play stages intertextual relationships with a range of classics from the modern theatre, each dealing with the models and ethics of revolutionary action: Brecht's The Decision (1930), Büchner's Danton's Death (1835), and Genet's The Blacks (1958), among others.

It is written in the first person as a 'stream of consciousness' but it lacks a discernible character-assigning speech-heading (this strategy, which leaves the text 'open' or 'writable' in Barthes' terms, is characteristic of Müller's dramaturgy).

Adopting a 'Kafkaesque', subjective perspective (the outlook, as Brecht put it, "of a man caught under the wheels"),[7] the protagonist of this section narrates a nightmarish dream sequence in which time and space become unhinged and dislocated as he travels in an elevator to receive, he anticipates with both pride and alarm, an important mission from the 'boss' ("whom I refer to in my mind" he says with epistrophic emphasis, "as No.

He goes on to suggest that it may be the play's activation of many different historical periods (his own 'post-revolutionary' time, the late twenties of Brecht's Lehrstücke, that of post-revolutionary France) that has produced its collage-like "deviation from some dramaturgical norm.

"[10] Müller links his dramaturgical experimentation explicitly with the attempt, given its most programmatic formulation by Strindberg eighty years earlier, to render a dream-logic in dramatic terms: