ÜBERGEWICHT, unwichtig: UNFORM

At an inn, six regulars, all of them so-called failures in life, and the landlady ponder life, responsibility and happiness. There is aggression in the air, one beer after the other is passed across the bar. Schweindi, Hasi, Karli, Herta, Jürgen, Fotzi and the landlady pull no punches with each other, but the situation really escalates when a so-called “beautiful couple” joins them.
The Austrian playwright Werner Schwab made a name for himself in the 1990s with his “excrement dramas”, works of language art that used set pieces from politics, advertisement and bureaucracy. Director Rieke Süßkow and her high-energy cast make masterful use of an unambiguous artificiality in “ÜBERGEWICHT, unwichtig: UNFORM” to unmask mechanisms of everyday life and to give Werner Schwab’s drastic language room to make an impact.

Statement of the Jury

Director Rieke Süßkow does not brush Werner Schwab’s “faeces drama” from 1991 the wrong way, on the contrary: She has studied it closely and stages it with delightful perfection in all its adolescent, sniggering obscenity. The inn where a group of miserable and violent regulars envy (and eat) a couple of beautiful newcomers is located inside a mouth that smacks and slurps most disgustingly. The characters wear half-inflated sex dolls and are targets in a fairground shooting gallery or a gaming machine. Their movements appear mechanical and each individual one is backed by a noise. Only after they have committed violence against the beautiful rich people do they become able to liberate themselves. Süßkow applies a strict concept and yet the details of its implementation remain surprising throughout. So we keep watching eagerly and begin to side with individual characters – although the only character that Schwab is interested in is language itself.

Tojuror Martin Thomas Pesl’s video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)

ProgrammeBooklet (pdf, 2.9 MB)