Renaissance des Dramatikers Werner Schwab | EUROtoday

So might that sound: “Archaeology, as the unburied, must one day be confused and sad about my reproachful remains,” it says at one level in Werner Schwab’s prose textual content “Waste, Bergland, Caesar” from 1990. Today, thirty years later Given the far too early demise of this Austrian enfant horrible of drama, these phrases have a justified ring when Schwab's oeuvre: “reproachful remains” – that basically sums it up fairly properly.

This additionally appears to draw a youthful era of administrators: David Bösch lately created an inspiring Schwab homage with “Schwabgasse 94” on the Graz Schauspielhaus. And the truth that the fecal drama “Overweight, unimportant: unformed” is invited to the Theatertreffen in a manufacturing by the Nuremberg State Theater will also be learn as a sign of a small Schwab renaissance.

Other works from the pen of the insubordinate playwright come to thoughts, after all his best-known play first: The indestructible “Presidents”, which has change into a contemporary actress traditional since Jan Bosse's triumphant Hamburg manufacturing in 2009, which reveals the disappointment of these left behind in society, interspersed with desires of hope. Also of “Annihilation of the people or my liver is senseless”, a perverted social illustration of people who find themselves able to all horrors – reflections of the evils of conflict in our world within the household cosmos and thus revenants of Alfred Jarry's “King Ubu”.

A battered individual

Schwab's items are influenced by Ödön von Horváth, in that they provide a voice to the lonely superfluous, however of their linguistic fury additionally by Thomas Bernhard and – with a view to the provocative lack of taboos – additionally by the early Franz Xaver Kroetz.

But Schwab, who as an artist additionally created sculptures from decaying objects, goes additional than all three authors talked about – his materials is and stays rawer even after it has been processed. He himself described his dramatic poetics in an interview with Wolfgang Kralicek in 1990 as follows: “It has to work just as well from back to front as from front to back. Because otherwise it's not a good play. (…) Writing a piece is nothing more than a rough statement.”

Today, the primary factor is to rediscover and rediscover Schwab's hardly ever to hardly ever performed texts. Ingeborg Orthofer, who was married to Werner Schwab and is the editor of the writer's version at Droschl Verlag, factors out two forgotten items specifically in an interview with the FAZ: Firstly, “Escalation Ordinary” with the subtitle “A headlock swing in seven affects” . The protagonist Brennwert, a financial savings financial institution worker, is humiliated in seven scenes, whether or not on the sausage stand or on the equestrian statue. “Work calls like a wilderness,” it’s stated, and you’ll really feel how a lot the obvious civilization is already deceiving itself within the small world of financial savings banks. Brennwert, who slaps himself within the face in a single scene and at last punches himself within the abdomen, speaks to us as a battered individual like a contemporary Woyzeck: “I was always able to cry in silence when strong people told me that I was an example of poor character I’m in favor of what a real human being shouldn’t look like.”

Life as a drug of demise

At Schwab, language at all times units itself aside from something pure and traditional. It is a synthetic language that takes what Horváth heard from instructional jargon and now finds it in obscene promoting. “You force yourself into a longing through language,” says Brennwert, solely to set your self on hearth a bit of later on the finish of “Escalation Ordinary”. The sensation-hungry lots which have continuously harassed him till now change into unsure for the primary time: “The photographers come in, are indecisive and don’t take photographs.”

The second piece that Orthofer factors out to us is an adaptation of Shakespeare's “Troilus and Cressida” – in Schwab it turns into: “Troiluswahn and Cressidatheater”. Already in his directions in the beginning of the piece, Schwab factors out that each character is already utterly misplaced and that the one factor that counts is the expertise. The textual content is about rehearsals for Shakespeare's play, so it’s initially a traditional metadrama, however then shortly turns right into a malicious commentary on theater as a noble artwork.

It is exactly via the parallelization of the Shakespeare translation with Schwab's language, the so-called “Schwabisch”, that the idiom safety of the educated center class is deconstructed. The piece culminates in a perverted parody of the operetta hit “It must be something wonderful” from the “Weißes Rössl”, which, stuffed with coarseness and vulgarity, ridicules any feel-good moments and factors to the omnipresent decay: individuals, because it says in direction of the tip of the piece , are only a “dying human model”, life is only a “death drug”.

It could be time for our time to spotlight Schwab's radicalism, particularly from the lesser-known texts, and to throw it on the theater world anew.