Alles Ausschalten (Turn Everything Off)

In 25 year-old Julian van Daal’s first stage play, three boys – A, B and S – and two girls – C and D – all around twenty meet in changing couples to talk about the joys and misfortunes of their generation. To talk? Not really. To wait around in silence, more like, to circle or stalk each other. Their clipped dialogues are extremely laconic. The author demonstrates an ability to practically sleepwalk into perfectly-timed punchlines. It is amazing how he manages to portray the situation in which these children of the crisis find themselves in such brief and compact scenes: a young mother is completely at a loss over the her non-relationship with her baby, a boy cares for his father who is in a wheelchair and is forced to listen to him, another tries to read a book, a third has killed one of his rivals. One realises to one’s surprise, that he is dead. Of course it was his own fault.

The text also contains sudden openings: monologues where the characters are capable of speech but no less at a loss in their search for answers to why the world has slipped out of their grasp. “A: What’s now snuck into the hanging heads of these youths is a feeling of anger, a feeling that wants to tell them: That’s not on. The only problem is that they don’t know exactly what it is they should do. They’re the children of the losers, and they have no voice. Television, the strongest voice in the world, may be for them, but it’s not about them. They are a grey area, one people gossip about like misery tourists but can never understand because they come from somewhere else.“ The five characters in van Daal’s play feel themselves being controlled by others from a distance and want only one thing: to make their own decisions, together.
Burghart Klaußner

Julian van Daal was born in 1985 in Hanover and worked as an intern and assistant at theatres in Hanover, Frankfurt and Hamburg with artists including Julia Hölscher. He has studied theatre direction at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna since 2008. “Turn Everything Off” is his first stage play.