Winterreise. A play

Elfriede Jelinek’s “Winterreise. A play” makes direct reference to the Franz Schubert’s homonymous song cycle: “A stranger I arrived, a stranger I depart” – using these opening words of the cycle as a starting point, Jelinek’s lyrical narrator sets off on a mental journey through her own biography and the insanity of the contemporary world. Loneliness and internal exile, alienation and perversion, displacement, transience and perversion are the existential questions of this text, which culminates in a merciless assessment of Jelinek’s own role as an author. A grand theatre-text of our times, interpreted by a grand actress of today, Sophie Rois.