EN_Ulrike Maria Stuart

In reminiscence of Schiller's drama, the Scottish ruler Mary Stuart and her English rival Elizabeth I meet for the queen's dispute over the sovereignty of interpretation of political discourse and the (im)possibility of political action.

Schiller's queens are overshadowed by the icons of left-wing terror: Ulrike Meinhof as Mary Stuart and Gudrun Ensslin as Elisabeth. A multi-voiced game about female identity begins in which the contours of the historical models become blurred.

The tornness of female identity between self-discovery, the public, political work and family connects Jelinek's women across different periods of history. They monologue in a lively manner in endless loops, through non-stop blocks of text and huge areas of language, mixing trivial and high literature with documentary quotations, language games and jokes with trash and the flood of information of the media age. And the fervor of their speech knows no end. Women silencing was yesterday.

Jelinek's women of power do not embody historically reconstructed biographies; instead, they represent a drilling into history for the archaic patterns of political sovereignty and the absence of the female body in politics. The Stammheim correctional facility and the English dungeon become the deadly battlefield of emancipation, the political stage of gender and power. With Jelinek, it is not the men who own the stage, but the queens of pop who exchange blows with the media public on the catwalk.