BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER

What happens if someone simply refuses to play along? BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER is at once a comedy and a deeply unsettling rejection of the logics of labour, productivity, and capitalist exploitation. It is a portrait of passive resistance, whose quiet refusal carries revolutionary force.

A lawyer hires a new scrivener: Bartleby. Unlike his other employees—Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut—Bartleby is expected to bring order and stability to the office, balancing out their eccentric habits and nervous peculiarities. At first, he proves to be a capable and diligent copyist. But then, without explanation, he begins to decline every request with the now-famous phrase: »I would prefer not to.«  He prefers not to proofread documents. He prefers not to run errands. He prefers not to leave the office. In short, he prefers not to work. Bartleby’s quiet refusal gradually unsettles his employer. For nothing is more disturbing to an earnest person than resistance that offers no argument, no protest, and no clear motive. The lawyer’s reaction shifts from sympathy to confusion, from concern to anxiety, from compassion to revulsion. What can be done about someone who simply refuses?

More than 170 years after its publication, BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER feels strikingly contemporary. In an age shaped by burnout, performance pressure, and the demand for constant self-optimization, Herman Melville’s story speaks directly to the present. Bartleby is not only one of literature’s great antiheroes; he is also a proto-Kafkaesque figure whose silent, almost enigmatic refusal exposes the fragility of systems built on obedience, productivity, and control. Without ever openly confronting power, he quietly undermines it.

René Fiegen, born in 1990, studied German language and literature, comparative literature and cultural studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Alongside his studies, he worked as a dramaturgy assistant at the German-Greek Theater (DGT) in Cologne under Kostas Papakostopoulos and held various part-time positions at the Theater Bonn. During the 2023–25 season, he served as an assistant director at Theater Bonn, where he assisted Volker Lösch, Katrin Plötner, Charlotte Sprenger, and Simon Solberg, among others. He realized his first small-scale projects for the Theaterfest Bonn and the FREISCHWIMMEN series at Theater Bonn. Since the 2025–26 season, he has been working as a stage manager at Theater Bonn. With BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER, René Fiegen makes his directorial debut with his own stage adaptation on the foyer stage of Theater Bonn.