An actor at a theatre in Germany was at the weekend shouted down, pelted with fruit and subjected to an attempted stage invasion as he delivered a final monologue in character as a far-right activist.

The violent scenes came on Saturday during the German premiere of the Portuguese playwright Tiago Rodrigues’s work Catarina, or the Beauty of Killing Fascists in Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia.

The provocative, prize-winning play from 2020 tells the story of a family with a macabre annual tradition: to avenge the murder of farm worker Catarina Eufémia, a real-life resistance martyr shot and killed in 1954 during the Salazar dictatorship, they kidnap a “fascist” each year in order to execute him during a family feast.

Over the course of the play a generational conflict breaks out between bloodthirsty parents and their more squeamish adult daughter about what means are justified to defend democracy. At the end of the last act, the year’s chosen victim, a far-right party functionary, delivers a 15-minute monologue laying out a nightmarish extremist agenda.

As the actor Ole Lagerpusch launched into the incendiary speech, the audience became increasingly agitated, the theatre spokesperson Alexander Kruse said. At first, people began whistling and heckling, insulting Lagerpusch and urging him to stop. An orange was thrown at the actor, narrowly missing him.

Kruse said some of the audience then got out of their seats. “Furthermore, two spectators mounted the stage, apparently with the intention of dragging [the] actor off the stage, which was prevented,” he said, calling the assault “completely unacceptable”.

Martin Krumbholz of the culture website Nachtkritik.de, who was at the Bochum Schauspielhaus to review the play, said Lagerpusch persevered despite the hostile reaction and managed to deliver his chilling last line: “The future belongs to us.”

The play’s acclaimed Slovenian director, Mateja Koležnik, said by telephone from Ljubljana that she was “incredibly proud” of Lagerpusch and denounced the “stupidity” and brutality of the spectators’ attack. “For me it was quite a shock – we did expect people talking back, even shouting back, because, of course, the last monologue is a provocation,” she said.

She said Lagerpusch, who she described as “traumatised”, was so effective in the role because he was softly spoken, even affable, in conveying his hateful, divisive message. “[But] I was astonished by the stupidity, really. I never ever thought – nobody did – that somebody from the audience would jump on stage and try to hit the actor … I would expect this from the people we are voting against, but not from the people who should be on our side.”

Koležnik said her intention with the production had not been to make “liberal, petit bourgeois society in Europe feel good” around a consensus of condemning intolerance, but to leave them scared. “The next wave of fascism, there will not be monsters. There will be normal, nice people,” she said.

The critic Christoph Ohrem of the regional public broadcaster WDR attended the premiere and released a brief audio recording of the tumult, which he said recalled something from the age of Shakespeare.

He noted Rodrigues’s piece had often triggered intense responses from audiences and concluded it was a “good play” for taking spectators out of their comfort zone. “It’s truly astonishing that a play can still elicit such reactions in 2026,” he said. Rodrigues has said he intended to cause a stir with the play.

In his review, Krumbholz placed the blame for the uproar on spectators. “Parts of the Bochum audience, which one would have thought to be among the most theatre-savvy in the country, are apparently too stupid, to put it bluntly, to distinguish between fiction and reality,” he said.

People expressed support for the theatre in Bochum on its Instagram page, with one commenter noting that a subsequent performance with stepped-up security measures, and after an appeal for calm by the deputy director Angela Obst, had gone off without incident.

Another spectator said of Saturday’s debacle that she had been “shocked how disrespectful some people can be in the theatre” when “the actor was just doing his job”.

A third called it “scary” when “supposedly anti-fascist theatregoers storm the stage and attack the actors. This is basically a fascist attitude towards art and theatre and, in my opinion, should never happen.”

Rodrigues’s play has won several awards including best foreign performance at Italy’s Ubu awards and the equivalent prize from the French Critics’ Union.