Kathrin Röggla

"The financial crisis conference, the nuclear storage conference, the renewable energies conference, the migration conference, the climate change conference, the transit question conference, the deficit conference", all in one week and on a global scale: this can lead to crisis, to a crisis of understanding. If we are to speak in many languages and if what we say is to be understood and if this should lead to a consensus and then to a final result…..there is one thing we can’t avoid: simultaneous interpreters.
Crammed into small cabins, locked in by the conferring masses, only equipped with headphones, a microphone, and cough buttons: six interpreters sit above the political agreement events which they accompany, and yes, make possible, or they follow decision-makers through hallways to so-called backroom talks. Their highly concentrated, seemingly bodiless speech transmission becomes a bridge into the centers of power, vocal neutrality becomes the challenge, and a chat with colleagues becomes proof of physical and mental identity.
The play, which was created for Frankfurter Positionen in 2011, reflects the world in snippets of the conversations between the simultaneous interpreters. It is a world where the French get along well with the British, where the Russians are military-minded but willing to integrate, and the Chinese are still dangerously underestimated. They all dream of the triumph of uncompromising unanimity over the eternal minimal consensus. Of a conference of clear announcements. But instead, they observe a situation of increasing speechlessness. This lack of language gradually degrades the perceptions of the interpreters ...
"Recently I read what we and the security people are called in the protocol ... the unavoidable ones!"