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.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYCYPRUS / 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.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYFRANCE / 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.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYGERMANY / 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.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYCZECH 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.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYSLOVENIA / 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.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYITALY / 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.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYTHE NETHERLANDS / 2021
Casper Vanderputte – Sweet Sixteen
The play proposed by de Toneelmakerij / The Netherlands was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2021
Casper Vanderputte's Sweet Sixteen is a powerful play on a most relevant and difficult subject, suicide at a young age. It is convincing in concept, structure and language, with well-written dialogues. It speaks from a unique perspective, thus creating a magical, but still vivid story-world. It has been written for a young audience as a classroom play but can certainly be adapted to different settings and captivate adult audiences as well.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYALBANIA / 2021
Elsa Demo – Grayish Green Into Black
The play is part of the Pipelines project, and was created in collaboration with the National Theatre of Albania
One winter day, an oil well bursts, in the triangle between the houses, the village cemetery and the ghost cinema. The house, the cemetery, the cinema, come as witnesses of a time that is older than the one the contemporary family lives in. Thus times join the wings, the past echoes the present, places echo people to say that the need for survival controls and challenges the spiritual needs within people of same kin, who are also the miniature of a polarized society.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYUKRAINE / 2021
Evangelos Kosmidis – Alaska
The text proposed by Dakh Theatre – Centre of Contemporary Arts / Ukraine was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2022
Alaska, by Greek stage director and author Evangelos Kosmidis, is a play and work in progress performance created as part of Dakh Theatre/Gogolfest’s Marathon of International Residencies in Mariupol (Ukraine) in 2021. While the play’s idea originated in Greece, it is only after arriving in Mariupol that the author managed to realise it, through research, interviews and devising work with his actors, members of the first theatre school-studio of Mariupol. While written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mariupol has been a city marked by war, near the front zone since 2014.
The play includes real thoughts and comments from the children and teenagers who faced the war, who went through all the horror, the children who lost their relatives and lost the opportunity to see them. Their monologues about love, friendship, loneliness, war… are combined with texts by Roland Bart, John Green, Sibylle Berg, Elise Wilk, Jorge Bucay, Maria Polidouri, Kostas Kariotakis, Pinelopi Delta and Evangelos Kosmidis himself. The author adds: “Alaska can be a message of peace and a warning to the world”.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYSLOVAKIA / 2019
Valeria Schulczová, Roman Olekšák – The Island
The play was proposed by Slovak National Drama Theatre / Slovakia for the ETC Drama Committee
The Island used to flourish with life, but nowadays only four native inhabitants live there. It is a family, which consists of a man, daughter, son, and neighbor - the Loner. During the storyline, the secret of the dark history is completely revealed. The island had been evacuated and they stayed there illegally. The sea level is alarmingly rising every year, so the government decided to move all the inhabitants to coast. At least that is what they think until the arrival of a couple – Man and woman. Part psychological drama, part criminal story, the play does not lose its magical, mythological elements.
Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYSLOVENIA / 2019
Simona Hamer – Everything OK
The text proposed by Slovensko Narodno Gledalisce Nova Gorica / Slovenia was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2022
Everything OK, by Slovenian playwright Simona Hamer, explores the topics of (un)employment, (im)migration, discrimination and racism, patriarchy, mental health, ageism, and loneliness through three intertwined storylines. The author explains: “For me, the play Everything OK is an x-ray of all the broken bones of today’s society and an invitation to recovery.”
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYBELGIUM / 2020
Emmanuel De Candido - The Flamboyant Round – The (il)legitimate Play of a Son of Colonialism
The text was proposed by Théâtre de Liège / Belgium for the ETC Drama Committee
Based on interviews and research that the author conducted in Sicily, the Democratic Republic
of Congo and Reunion Island, this fable for five characters tells the story of a debt.
Five actors dance a round, before sitting down.
It is the story of an old banker who has to leave a country he loves like an abusive father.
It is the story of a young politician who is trying to restore his town's financial accounts before
the elections.
It is the story of a political opponent who tries to hide an embarrassing corpse.
It is the story of a former child soldier who has become a gardener, caught up in the violence of
his own people.
It is the story of a young merchant woman whose man has just been abandoned at the bottom of
a well.
It is the story of a circular debt, a debt they will have to settle in two nights, a debt that passes
from hand to hand, gorged with blood, silence and violence.
It all begins with an enigma whose resolution could have saved the living and honoured the
dead.
Unfortunately, this story is inspired by real facts.
It is therefore a tragedy.
Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYCZECH REPUBLIC / 2021
Marie Nováková – Landscape with Warehouses
The play was proposed by Narodni divadlo - National Theatre Prague / Czech Republic for the ETC Drama Committee
The border area in the westernmost part of the Czech Republic is a turbulent place where people didn’t get a chance to stay for any longer period and put down roots.
Maciej from Poland thus finds a close soul in Greta, a dead German girl who fell victim to the hostility of the Czechs towards the Germans in the post-war period. Marika, an elderly prostitute who is seeing a Bosnian worker, Danilo, at the barracks, finds among the workers a child born twenty-five years ago of whom she lost track after his placement in a care home. The annual gathering of retired border-guard soldiers is interrupted by a ghost of their former comrade, who mercilessly destroys their long-developed cover legend about brave guardians of the republic. Danilo, broken down and tortured by the heavy work, is freed by a horde of Bashkirian warriors who died in a prison camp during WWI and are buried underneath the logistics warehouses. But Christmas is coming, and the workers must keep working so that gifts are delivered in time.
Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYTHE NETHERLANDS / 2020
Abdelkader Benali – Hamlet
The play was proposed by De Toneelmakerij / The Netherlands for the ETC Drama Committee
Abdelkader Benali and dramaturg Paulien Geerlings situated 'the ultimate revenge tragedy' within the context of a (fictionalized) highly-segregated neighbourhood in Amsterdam New-West, where the local people are juxtaposed against the real estate elite.
Shakespeare's classic was thereby interwoven with the modern world of influencers, climate critics and criminal money. The text, however, closely follows the dramaturgy and plot development of the original. Hamlet returns from his private school, to his old migrant neighborhood and finds himself in a new world. The streets of his childhood have been swept away by the world of money. Values have been replaced by status. His father has ‘disappeared’ and his mother has remarried his uncle. An enormous construction site makes up the physical centre of this polarized environment and social housing has to make way for a sky-high luxury building for the rich and famous which his uncle is building. In doing so, he will only further widen the gap between people of different classes and cultures.
Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLY
