When the Will Awakens

In 1914 Rudolf Steiner should have written his Fifth Mystery Drama. It would have been the next after a series of four that he began in 1910, however the outbreak of the First World War prevented him from doing this. After the war Steiner was repeatedly asked to write down and stage his fifth play but claimed that the time was never right for this to be possible.

This new work by Michael Hedley Burton is not the Fifth Mystery Drama, but it is an attempt to come as close as possible to a recreation of what Steiner might have written if he had been able to express in written form what he had already worked out as ideas. Michael Burton wrote When the Will Awakens over a period of six years from 2012 to 2018.

As Karl Karltenbach writes in his introduction, the play “reminds us of the deep hope we carry within us that, after evil has prevailed, the driving forces of anti-evolution, personified in these plays under the name Ahriman, can be redeemed through love.”