“Sonny Steele is an aging former rodeo champion. He’s sunk low and sold himself as a publicity cowboy to a food company. “He’s nothing more than a cheap imitation of himself. The conflict arises when the company makes the famous racehorse ‘Rising Star’ its corporate symbol. In order to keep the stallion calm and to make him compliant for the shows, he is pumped full of medication.

When the electric rider learns of this abuse, he steals the $12 million horse to release it into the wild. Accompanied by romantic country-and-western ballads, he dreams of a life in untouched nature and of an America free of commerce. The leitmotif is the longing for freedom. No longer for himself, but on behalf of the racehorse, Sonny tries to fight for freedom against all odds.

This play brought Klaus-Gregor Eichhorn as a micro-project of the first round into the Alte Straßenbahndepot Kappel. A Hamburg theatre company with strong Chemnitz sympathies performed an enthralling play at this special location on the border between pop and philosophy. After the bank robber drama “Hundstage” in the old Sparkasse bank on Augustusburger Straße in winter 2013, “Der elektrische Reiter” galloped through the old tram depot (now part of the tram museum) in Chemnitz-Kappel on April 13, 2018.

And how perfectly did the story fit in with a place where the first horse-drawn tram in Chemnitz was first built in 1880, which was then “electrified” a few years later, i.e. became an “electric rider”, so to speak? And today it is a museum, a backdrop of narrow-gauge railway, socialist building slogans and a small station, which with its mini tower clock is quite reminiscent of a western.

It was a special, profound, weird and entertaining evening of theatre (including a horse philosophizing about freedom) at a place away from the usual stages, but in the middle of Chemnitz, which perhaps deserves the title “Capital of Culture”.