SLOVENIA / 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.”

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war  |  devised theatre  |  ukraine  |  full text

UKRAINE / 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”.

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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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THE 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.

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ecology  |  corruption  |  full text  |  pipelines

MALTA / 2022

Simone Spiteri – Wolf/Sheep

The play is part of the Pipelines project, and was created in collaboration with Teatru Malta

The fuel industry is fueled by corruption, corruption fuels the fuel company. Corruption fuels us all and we fuel it back. Even if we don't think we do, or refuse to accept that we do. Wolf/Sheep is a play about this vicious cycle: a massive iceberg, not its tip ... we all know who those people up there are, but its base is Us. You. Me. And how we all, by doing nothing or thinking there is nothing to do, have allowed these things to happen. Things of all sorts: the trivial, the inconsequential, but the horrific too.

Malta loves a nationwide blackout. Despite very recent state-of-the-art new fuel storage systems. But lack of actual light every now and then is not the only thing keeping us in the dark. Allegorical, satirical, political ... the play evaluates, observes and pushes the limits of a country (perhaps a world?) that can be as surreal as it is confused, noisy, passive, passionate and chaotic. Ultimately, we are all anesthetized, by the wolf, maybe? But the real question is what kind of fuel is our new opium and who are the real wolves and the real sheep?

The play will premiere at Teatru Malta in the season 2022/2023.

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ecology  |  full text  |  pipelines

ALBANIA / 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.

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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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AUSTRIA / 2019

Svenja Viola Bungarten – Garland

The play proposed by Schauspielhaus Graz for the ETC Drama Committee

It could be Mars. An area outside Madrid. The Mojave Desert. Or the Sahara. But let's not forget where we are. We are in Germany. In America near Penig, district of Central Saxony, to be precise. And the catastrophe is everywhere: the country is a blazing oven, the earth is withering, houses are burning down, there has been no wind for months. And there is no tornado far and wide to save the crisis-ridden characters from their fate.

But there is a girl named Dorothee Sturm, and she has set her mind on nothing less than saving the world. Too bad she seems to attract misfortune. Em and Henri can tell you a thing or two about that. They are not the parenting type, they are the farming type and lost first their dignity and then their farm in a fire. While the desperate policeman Gus Brandt sets out on the trail of the suspected arsonist, he in turn is sought by his brother, the filmmaker Salvatore Brandt. He is interviewed, overworked and underpaid, by Lorna Luft, host of the radio programme HOT TIMES. How a gigantic truck comes into the game and why Judy Garland, of all people, shines behind the counter of a petrol station - GARLAND also tells about that.

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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