Marlene Streeruwitz

Barbies as highly pregnant opera ball debutantes after a mass rape. Kens as holy Sebastians, Spiderman, who only visits the opera and can hold monologues about God and Eros, three old choirboys as street musicians. The thudding of freight trains heading for Auschwitz accompany their dance. The other visitors to a Viennese coffee house – petit bourgeois and disappointed characters – perceive these phenomena as normal or don’t even notice them. They all take part in the sell-out of “Old Vienna”. Clichés are perpetuated, held high and demolished: the death wish, Mozart balls, Sissi, the big feelings: “We’re not even a museum anymore.” And in all of this, Manon Greef remembers her marriage to an alcoholic. After spending many years abroad, at the age of 75 she’s visiting her hometown of Vienna and especially the square with the coffee house she used to know. She also remembers her friend, blonde and tall, who was “one of the first” to be deported. Manon is accompanied by her daughter Linda, who refuses to have anything to do with Austria or Vienna in the face of this absurd panopticon. But she’s in the middle of it.

Apart from in quotes – and the play is full of quotes – the characters can only speak in a staccato rhythm anymore. A damaged language – for a damaged life. The images repeat in variations and intertwine, forming a great and evil grotesque.

“These texts by Marlene Streeruwitz have brought a new speculative fiction to theatre – aggressive, reckless and outrageously alive”
(Siegfried Kienzle)