Am Königsweg (The Royal Road)

Ostensibly structured as a reckoning with the “stable genius” of US-president Donald Trump, Elfriede Jelinek’s “Am Königsweg (The Royal Road)” turns out to be an eagle’s flight across around 2000 years of human history and its mountain ranges of authoritarian politics. What kinds of contexts of violence cause societies to take form through the exclusion of others? What archaic longings drive them to see their will embodied by an individual, a king, a leviathan? Jelinek asks these questions and director Falk Richter clothes them in a burlesque, quintessentially anti-authoritarian aesthetics of abundance: a bombardment of images and brilliant solo acts – including the brazen stand-up interludes of comedienne Idil Baydar, whose alter ego Jilet Ayşe deconstructs everyday racism in Europe. United in spirit, Jelinek and Richter fight for a free, exuberantly associative and open poetry that will pulverise the crude “us or them”-ideology championed by the Putins, Orbáns or Trumps of this world.

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