Ulrike Maria Stuart

Elfriede Jelinek continues to write the history of our state of mind. “Ulrike Maria Stuart” projects an argument between Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin onto the female dynamic in Schiller’s “Maria Stuart”, Maria against Elisabeth. The people, Gudrun says, don’t want us. But Ulrike can’t give up the people. Together they are stuck in the dead end of political representation. And Jelinek batters on the locked door behind which another country, utopia, once lay. The clang of metal is the exuberance of her language. Nicolas Stemann turns this into the loudest political revue for a long time, a great potpourri of terror which is also a joyous satire on Berlin’s media democracy. Equally shared out, through the phases of depression, corrupted into entertainment. The play about the problems of political involvement, the play about the continually renewed RAF debate, about the ghosts we cannot get rid of, whether they are in prison or pardoned, on stage or inside our heads.