DIE ANKUNFT

Arthur-Schnitzler-Platz 1

1070 Wien

 

Four plays by Elfriede Jelinek, spanning almost four decades, written between 1988 and 2025. THE ARRIVAL is a theatrical marathon at the right time—here, in the land of mountains, the land by the river. And now, as the last bastions of division in Europe begin to crumble.

1945, the final days of the war: A lavish party is held at Rechnitz Castle in Burgenland. As its climax, guests shoot approximately 200 Jewish forced laborers. In the 2000s, a right-wing extremist terrorist cell goes on a killing spree unhindered across Germany. In both cases, the legal proceedings are sluggish, witnesses remain silent, and evidence disappears. And today? The political center is silent, the shift to the right is in full swing, nationalist and radical thinking are once again becoming socially acceptable—and frightening continuities are becoming increasingly apparent.

Elfriede Jelinek distills both contemporary history and the immediate present into great literature. RECHNITZ (THE EXTERMINATION ANGEL) is her central work about Nazi crimes and their legacy; in THE SILENT GIRL, she grapples with the NSU murders and the subsequent trials. And in FAREWELL – NO: THE ARRIVAL, she elevates the triumphantly clumsy rhetoric of right-wing agitators to a breathless hymn of fantasies of seizing power and fascist nature poetry. Jan Philipp Gloger, who has been engaging with the work of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek for many years in productions, including world and German premieres, assembles four of her plays into a grand conceptual edifice of repression and return. An evening exploring the traditions of nationalist thought and right-wing violence across the centuries – and an evening that traces the madness and laments the forgetting and the silence surrounding it. Jelinek's early work CLOUDS.HOME serves as a prologue. Here, Hölderlin, Hegel, and other classics already speak in a chorus of national pathos – thus paving the way for the future.

(Source: volkstheater.at)