This year’s edition of the annual DramatikerInnenfestival in Graz (Austria) will include a special focus on theatre from the Low Countries. Flanders Literature would like to take this opportunity to also highlight a selection of drama texts from Flanders online. Discover them below, and visit the festival website for more information about the programme in Graz from 12 to 16 June.
The editorial board of Cult Weekly magazine has called a crisis meeting. The image of a black woman on the cover of their latest issue has unleashed a social media storm. How sincere or how arrogant and patronising is their social engagement really?
After this performance, you will feel somewhat revitalized. It is magic.
Knack Focus
‘Unisono’ is an intimate monologue, performed by one actor in a minimalist setting. Whereas ‘Unisono’ tries to find words for loneliness, ‘Platina’ is an equally spare text about two people facing a final goodbye.It is the silence that speaks loudest – even if the woman ultimately breaks it with a veritable deluge of words that seek to express her love and pain.
In ‘The Tsar’s Shears’ three people live together in one room, secluded from the outside world. Until one day the tsar emerges from the tube and disrupts the order of their micro society. All of a sudden the rules don’t seem that logical anymore.
Vielen is both a masterful writer and a born story-teller.
Cutting Edge
‘The Arrival of the Titanic’ is an intelligent and astute theatre monologue. On the one hand there is a ship that sinks – an event with clear echoes of the Costa Concordia disaster in 2012. On the other hand, the brief snippets that fit together like a mosaic are about a more metaphorical catastrophe.
An astute monument to the dislocation of modern man. A light-hearted yet meaningful portrait of an inscrutable reality.
Cutting Edge
The play wants to explore how some of the most famous exiles of the 20th century defended, revised or abandoned their European traditions in their new ‘paradise’. And whether we, in this day and age, could or would mount a similar defence. An exploration of ‘home’ and the idea of feeling displaced in your own home country.
In a candid conversation, the two characters explore how this new situation can bring them together and how this illness either challenges or strengthens their friendship. Tragicomic, vulnerable and moving – but above all genuine.
Theatre is rarely as disarming, as sophisticated, as urgent as this.
Jury report Theaterfestival
Krenz symbolises a life lived as a runner-up, waiting on the sidelines for one’s moment – a moment that never lives up to long-held expectations. Willem de Wolf links Krenz’s story to his own family history. In this smart, sharp and funny text, De Wolf dissects the frustrations and loneliness that lie behind ambition.
Wildekids' biggest trump card is its playful, multi-layered text.
Theaterkrant
A bitter-sweet tale of poverty and its presence in the world of two inseparable children. Both heart-warming and heart-rending, with playful humour and plenty of imagination, two fierce firecrackers find each other in a priceless friendship.
