Dear friends of Schauspielhaus, dear audience,
after a challenging starting period (for us as well as you) during which we strained all of our capacities with relish, we
are returning from the holidays full of anticipation and eager to fight and are looking forward to a third year together with
you at Schauspielhaus. We’d love to debauch you to explore new grounds and question conventional genres with us. We have
managed a lot over the first two years, a range of invitations to festivals and guest performances show that our theatre is
perceived as a cell of innovation in Vienna and beyond. We will continue this direction and will also continue to gauge the
concept of author’s theatre in a progessive way.
„Schauspielhaus Vienna is pulsating“, „Standard“ wrote about our work last winter. We were delighted because
this is what we want to be: a bold laboratory of dramatic, theatrical innovation, that discovers artists for you and offers
shelter for experiments.
From the beginnning we have worked closely with playwright Thomas Köck and have already successfully produced two world premieres
of his plays. A third one will open this autumn at our theatre. The more we are delighted for Thomas Köck that the Burgtheater
has discovered this most innovative Austrian writer sínce Werner Schwab and that it will stage his play „Paradies fluten“
in a big scale production. All of this is happening whilst Köck is writing on a commission for us, his new play „Die
Zukunft reicht uns nicht (Klagt, Kinder, klagt!)“ and at the same time he is giving his debut as director at our theatre
- together with Elsa-Sophie Jach.
After his world project „Cellar Door“, Thomas Bo Nilsson will direct his next big project at Berliner Ensemble.
At the same time he will stay linked to us and will continue to unsettle Vienna with more irritating spaces. After his premiere
of Miroslava Svolikova’s „Diese Mauer fasst sich selbst zusammen und der Stern hat gesprochen, der Stern hat auch
was gesagt“, the director Franz-Xaver Mayr was invited to direct at Burgtheater in this season. We are also delighted
about this and it speaks in favour of our common project.
We regard the fact that the jury of Berlin Festspiele shortlisted two of our productions (Jan-Christoph Gockel’s „Imperium“,
that was nominated for a Nestroy Award and will be revived in November, and Thomas Bo Nilsson’s „Cellar Door“)
for Theatertreffen 2017; and that „Diese Mauer fasst sich selbst zusammen…“ was invited to Autorentheatertage
at Deutsche Theater Berlin and „Città del Vaticano“ to Lessingtage at Thalia Theater Hamburg as crucial proofs for
the extraordinary international esteem for our work. It is also this esteem that encourages us to continue the chosen artistic
path decidedly.
We achieved to convince Gernot Grünewald to open the new season, a popular director who frequently works at Thalia Theater
Hamburg and Deutsches Theater Berlin and is celebrated for his radical aesthetic settings. Grünewald will deal with the Golem
myth in a visually stunning, musical and theatrical way and link it to the current questions of digitalisation and transhumanism.
We will continue to connect with the city, and in a cooperation with Bernhard Studlar and WIENER WORTSTAETTEN we will pursue
our engagement with collective writing processes by offering a forum at Schauspielhaus to Writers Room of WIENER WORTSTAETTEN
and by starting our own experiment about serial narration at theatres with SEESTADT-SAGA. Directed by Tomas Schweigen, this
project will combine several strands of our work in a new format: our intense collaboration with authors and immersive theatre
in public space.
With Jakob Nolte we present one of the most unusual new German writers for the first time: His comedy „Gespräch wegen
der Kürbisse“ will be directed by Marco Štorman whose production of „Kudlich“ was clebrated in Vienna
and on Theaterallianz tour last year. In this intimate project he will once again burst the traditional arrangement of stage
and auditorium.
This season we are once again looking for thematical links between our aesthetically diverse productions, whilst urgent questions
will return with new accentuations. 2017/18 we are focussing with „Die Zukunft reicht uns nicht…“ and „Elektra“
on questions of individual and cultural heritage as well as family power structures. We are delighted to welcome the Austrian-American
lyricist Ann Cotten with „Elektra“, her first theatre piece.
Over the past two years we have developed an effective structure of innovative forums with the newly structured Hans-Gratzer-Stipendium
and the associated writing workshop „Infiziert!“ where we accompany and support authors during the writing process.
Two highly poetic theatre pieces, fascinating stories with a dense and powerful eloquence, have been developed in these dramatic
laboratories – „Mitwisser“ by Enis Maci and „Ein Körper für jetzt und heute“ by Mehdi Moradpour –
and will be produced in the new season.
As you can see, we will remain adventurous, will question us and our work and will keep trying new things, without fear of
the constant threat of failure. We’d love to present our plans that we have developed in many conversations with our
team and associated artists with passionate antipcipation.
We are looking forward to seeing you!
Tomas Schweigen, Künstlerischer Leiter & Geschäftsführer
Tobias Schuster, Leitender Dramaturg
