Written in response to World War I, Karl Kraus’s satirical tragedy Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind) was intended for a ‘theatre on Mars’, as no stage on earth could possibly do justice to the pandemonium it depicts. Over a staggering 220 scenes, the work takes us away from the Front in hot pursuit of the Great War’s worst horrors and excesses. The music in this production draws on Kraus’s techniques of montage and quotation in an attempt to express the unspoken and unspeakable.