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.”
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYFRANCE / 2018
Mariette Navarro – Zone à étendre
The play proposed by La Mousson d’été 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 ONLYTHE NETHERLANDS / 2020
Abdelkader Benali – Hamlet
The play proposed by De Toneelmakerij 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 Values have been replaced by status.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 ONLYSLOVAKIA / 2001
Roman Polàk – Scenes from the Life of Director (Ingmar Bergman)
Ingmar Bergman is one of the most important and influential theatre and film directors of the twentieth century. Drawing not only on his own memoirs and scripts, but also on the recollections of his collaborators, the play captures him directing a theatrical production. The story touches on the very essence of artistic work and theatre, the nature of the director's profession, and his efforts to exorcise his own demons, while trying to name the demons of the whole society. The play intertwines the director's personal problems with his parents, partners and collaborators with the problems of artistic work in the creation of a theatrical work.
Scenes from the life of the director (Ingmar Bergman) reflect, through Bergman's life, the profession of the director, or the artist as such - the motives that lead one to this profession, the relationship with the actors, the search for the meaning of theatre, the relationship between creation and life, etc.
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 ONLYAUSTRIA / 2019
Martin Plattner – rand: ständig
Austria, a small town in the Tyrolean Alps, winter sports area: the scene is a district where no
building was done in the past because avalanches regularly occur here on the edge of town. A
few years ago, however, the city government decided to build here after all: social housing. The
socially disadvantaged, the marginalized, were relocated to this newly created edge of town. The
actual reason for the relocation is tourism, in the center of the village space should be created
for more hotels, parking spaces, and to remove the socially disadvantaged from the tourists'
field of vision. But now it has happened again: Crescentia, as the avalanche that descends on
this slope is called from time immemorial, has gone off again. It buried the new buildings and the
people living in them. Also some ski tourists. But it is precisely these marginalized people who
now crawl out of the avalanche cone and become aware of their unfortunate situation.
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 ONLYBELGIUM / 2020
Emmanuel De Candido - The Flamboyant Round – The (il)legitimate Play of a Son of Colonialism
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.
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DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYCYPRUS / 2020
Antonis Georgiou - In Critical Condition
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 ONLY
