PORTUGAL / 2022

Miguel Castro Caldas – The Frailty of Togetherness

This text excerpt proposed by São Luiz Teatro Municipal was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2024.

The Frailty of Togetherness stems from a desire to discuss – dialogically - the most pressing and complex challenges Europe and the world is facing today: the (re)rise of populism and authoritarian models. By participating in this current dialogue, this play proposes to look at key concepts such as democracy, liberalism, capitalism and marriage. What do they mean? Do they still matter today?

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CROATIA / 2022

Tomislav Zajec – The Vanishing

This text excerpt was proposed by the Croatian National Theatre to the ETC Drama Committee in 2024.

Through several narrative lines that intertwine with each other in a non-linear arrangement of time, in The Vanishing we are gradually revealing the truth about the terrible crime that is committed against Marko, a six-year-old hearing-impaired boy.

In this play Tomislav Zajec does not console us and does not seduce us with sentiment, he does not moralise. With his dramatic score he invites both individuals and the wider social community to break the wall of silence.

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ecology  |  full text  |  pipelines

AUSTRIA / 2022

Magdalena Schrefel – What ignites, what burns

The play is part of the Pipelines project, and was created in collaboration with Schauspielhaus Graz

In the subsoil of Europe, a branched circulatory system of crude oil is relaxing. Pipelines run through the continent like lifelines and fuel our hunger for energy. Despite all efforts, global oil production has increased continuously over the past fifty years. Nothing, it seems, can stop the catastrophic cycle.

"What ignites, what burns" is about two young women who try anyway. The Kleist Prize winner Magdalena Schrefel has taken on the Austrian part and designed a theatrical road movie along the Adria-Vienna pipeline. It shows the journey of its two heroines across Austria and the endless expanses of the Internet and describes their encounters with climate activists, various eccentric figures of the fossil age and their radicalization: How can narrative means blow up a pipeline?

The play premiered in Schauspielhaus Graz in January 2022, staged by German director Marie Bues.

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THE NETHERLANDS / 2022

Magne van den Berg – Snackbar

This text excerpt proposed by De Toneelmakerij was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2024.

Snackbar (translation: Cafeteria) deals with the harsh realities of child sexual abuse and incest. This is a profound and disconcerting play about the courage it takes to stand up for yourself and others. More than focussing on the physical horrors of sexual abuse, the play investigates the horror of silence and celebrates the strength of those who dare to break it.

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ITALY / 2022

Nalini Vidoolah Mootoosamy – Lost&Found

This text excerpt proposed by PAV was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2024.

Lost&Found is a play on the right to freedom of movement. A right that often becomes a privilege based on “who we are” and “where we come from”. On one side, we follow the story of two tourists (A and B) who, thanks to the privilege of their European passports, can move more freely in non-European countries and visit places they consider to be their “dream places”. On the other hand, we witness the misadventures of X, a migrant without the right documents, to reach and stay in his “dream place”: the European fortress.

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BULGARIA / 2023

Anna Petrova – Everyone Neighed After His Neighbor’s Wife

This text excerpt was proposed by the Theatre and Music Centre Kardjali to the ETC Drama Committee in 2024.

Everyone Neighed After His Neighbor’s Wife is a bittersweet symphony with unexpected twists and turns. Every attempt by the heroes to achieve intimacy is destroyed with sarcasm. A clash between The Man and The Woman rife with love and power. They both hurt each other to hide their vulnerability. They fight with irony and sarcasm, but there are no winners in this war. 

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FRANCE / 2018

Mariette Navarro – Zone à étendre

The play was proposed by La Mousson d’été / France for the ETC Drama Committee

We first follow a group of people walking side by side along a forest path. They get to know each other as they progress through the forest and share pieces of their history, their convictions, their doubts and hopes, while the forest revives feelings buried within them in an immemorial relationship to legends and magic. All these people have a different reason for joining the march, but that they are all doing it to take a step aside from the power in place, a power they no longer identify with or they no longer want to support. They are, in fact, on their way to a clearing where a community they wish to join has been established.

Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.

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CYPRUS / 2020

Antonis Georgiou - In Critical Condition

The play was proposed by Cyprus Theatre Organisation (THOC) for the ETC Drama Committee

Written in the contemporary Cypriot dialect, Antonis Georgiou’s play is a sequence of twentytwo monologues and twelve multi-character scenes, unfolding outside a hospital intensive care unit. Five characters are going through emotions of expectation and an underlying absence, as two of their loved ones are confined in the ICU beds in critical condition. One of them is Paris’s mother, Zoe, while Chrystalla and her two sons (Christos and Andreas) and Elena, are worried about Marios, their son, brother, and partner. The space of the hospital gradually transforms into a rink on which an endless battle takes place, a space where suspended sorrow reveals the characters’ exposure to the fragility of existence. Each one of them fights their own struggle, experiencing unexpected circumstances and manifesting behaviours revealing their own vulnerability. Five micro-stories within a familiar, everyday environment; with death as the epicentre.

Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.

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SPAIN / 2023

Jokin Oregi – Where are the Children?

This text excerpt was proposed by Teatro Arriaga to the ETC Drama Committee in 2024.

In Where are the Children? we find ourselves facing a story that narrates an unusual event – the death of an eight-year-old girl. The evidence points to suicide as the cause of death. In this spatial-temporal mosaic what appears to be a story centred around an absent girl becomes a choral portrait of the adults living in relation to the children in the play.

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UNITED KINGDOM / 2022

Teunkie Van Der Sluijs – Tikkun Olam

This text excerpt was proposed by Young Vic to the ETC Drama Committee in 2024.

Black, Jewish, and chronically online: influencer LEAH, twenty-something, has a large following and is a savvy voice in politics and current events. But she is fiercely guarded about her personal life, which she protects from her social media activities. That becomes complicated when she’s thrown into the centre of a media storm in British politics between advocates and opponents of a proposed Holocaust memorial near London's Houses of Parliament.

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GERMANY / 2021

Patty Kim Hamilton – Sex Play

The text proposed by Deutsches Theater Berlin / Germany was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2021

Patty Kim Hamilton’s SEX PLAY portrays with talent the increasingly complicated topics of human sexuality and gender identities, as well as the stress, frustration and sometimes violence these topics carry. Its contemporary composition and structure give a voice to an undefined number of characters in a series of situations and conversations, in which the author combines a very delicate balance between poetry and realistic, humorous writing, with organic and believable dialogues.

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CZECH REPUBLIC / 2021

Ondřej Novotný – The Father Watches Over the Daughter

The text proposed by National Theatre Prague / Czech Republic was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2021

Ondřej Novotný‘s Father Looks After Daughter is a play built around a young father taking his pre-school daughter for a walk in a park and to the playground. The play tackles intergenerational dialogue, with dynamic situations and very natural interactions between the different characters. The diversity of those characters and the polyphonic structure of the play contribute to creating a particular atmosphere, while the insertion of the main protagonist’s lines brings a subtle and well-mastered touch of poetry.

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SLOVENIA / 2020

Simona Semenič – Beautiful Vidas Burn Beautifully

The play was proposed by Prešernovo Gledališče Kranj / Slovenia for the ETC Drama Committee

A play about historically significant and historically less significant women who have been persecuted for being different. Or just for being a female. A witch-hunt through the centuries is transmitted to a metaphorical level as the play deals with women as Joanna the Mad, Camille Claudel, Virginia Woolf, and other historically recognized women, but also with unnamed women, all of whom were victims of the patriarchal society in the past. The play is intertwining historical facts and figures with the present time inequality issues. The form of the plays is inventive, it's based on pagan rituals and combined with methods of contemporary playwriting.

Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.

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SLOVENIA / 2023

Milan Ramšak Marković – A Rainy Day in Gurlitsch

This text excerpt proposed by Prešernovo Gledališče Kranj was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2024.

A Rainy Day in Gurlitsch is inspired by a wish to play with road-movie dramaturgy in theatre. Beginning as a benign dialogue play showing a dinner party in a charming middle-class home, we slowly turn to the central theme of the play: a fragmented trip through a traumatic feeling of loss that we recognise as common in today’s Western liberal culture.

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ITALY / 2022

Melania G. Mazzucco – Dulan, the Bride

The play was proposed by Teatro Stabile de Torino / Italy for the ETC Drama Committee

Dulan, the bride could be described as a noir story. The play is about a troubled middle-aged couple, they are just married but they are somehow hounded by the ghost of a girl who was found dead in the pool of the building where they are going to live. Dialogue after dialogue, some disturbing questions emerge: who was that young woman? Did the man know her? Was it a suicide or an act of violence? In this spiral of questions and conjecture, the image of a young foreign woman stands out, a victim of oppression and male violence.

Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.

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