After the end of these festivals, you want to shout "wow". And maybe a little "phew" afterwards. After all, the ten days of the ambitious Heidelberger Stückemarkt, founded in 1984 and now taking place for the fortieth time, are always a challenge. Because in the afternoon you sit for hours in staged readings and subsequent discussions, in the evening in guest performances of up to three hours, and in between you constantly think about it: What is contemporary theatre supposed to achieve?

Jan Wiele

Editor in the feuilleton.

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The guest performances, which according to the festival statutes are "outstanding world premieres from the German-speaking world", are initially a huge service for the Heidelberg audience: one evening the Vienna Burgtheater comes, at other ensembles from Hamburg, Hanover, Dresden or Basel. The Basel production of Manuela Infante's "How it all ends" was such a "wow" moment.

Doomsday on Autotune

Three female characters are here in an initially Beckett-like "endgame" situation, in which several curtains fall at the beginning and one sees oneself catapulted into a grotesque metadrama in which many allusions to theatre history are incorporated, including Chekhov's "Three Sisters", of course. Their briefly quoted longing "To Moscow!" causes laughter, which then gets stuck in the throat, while slowly it becomes clearer that one is in a kind of fever dream of a woman who has gone on hunger strike out of disgust for the world and is on the verge of death.

The way Elmira Bahrami, Marie Löcker and Gala Othero Winter fire off spoken theatre punchlines, sometimes revealing dancing and pantomime talent, is strong in itself; how they then transform their speech into harmony vocals generated by "autotune" on microphones is as surprising as it is overwhelming in view of the drastic doomsday lyrics.

A perfectly staged evening like this is juxtaposed with the raw draft aesthetics of the staged readings at the Stückemarkt, in which new theatre texts are heard for the first time in the afternoon authors' competition. This can be as tedious as in the case of Kim de L'Horizon's "Then Make Lemonade, Bitch", which made the competitive situation itself a topic and shifted the discourse on what theatre is supposed to do today into an absurd talk show in the stomach of a monster, but seemed more like an embarrassment draft.

People overrepresented?

In the ensuing discussion, the fictional character, who describes himself as non-binary, who was awarded the German Book Prize last year, explained that people are overrepresented in the theatre, and that more bodies belonging to other categories should be invited onto the stage.