Thomas Perle

In Ocna Sibiului, the Romanian Salzburg, Jedermann has bought his way in and, with his wife and two children, dreams of a ski resort much like the one in Austria. Here they host galas and parties for their dinner guests. Mrs. Jedermann plays the generous charity lady, without a sense for the real needs of the people. The marriage of the two has mainly representative purpose. Secretly, Jedermann lives a forbidden homosexual relationship with Buhl, tainted with shame by society and the church. But foresters disappear in the forests around them. Their dead bodies are found brutally mutilated days later. When Buhl also disappears and is brought to Jedermann half dead, half alive, the latter shows his true character.

"What has remained of the medieval play are the two Trobairitzen (female troubadours) that frame the plot and haunt the play," is how Thomas Perle himself describes his version of Jedermann, explicitly defined as a rewrite. The form is abridged to short, pithy verses. He has the play set in Transylvanian Salzburg, inspired by the annual venue of the original. Adapted to the Romanian context, he takes up themes that are important to him, such as the visibility of same-sex love on stages in the Balkans. Death does not appear figuratively in Perle's work. The themes of death and dying are taken up with the theme of the forest workers murdered in Romania by the timber mafia. Thomas Perle reads Jedermann's behavior as pure egotism and ruthlessness. And so it is not Jedermann who experiences death in the end.