Noise. Vision Obscured!

The virus, society and death: in a «cacophony of insanity» (Nachtkritik), the torrent of news, analyses, warnings, rumours and conspiracy theories that has swamped us since the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic erupts once more. Visual worlds overlap: the super-spreader event in the Austrian ski resort of Ischgl becomes the feast of Odysseus and his companions at the palace of the sorceress Circe, who turns men into pigs and transports them to meat factories, where further contagion threatens. Right-wing populism and anti-Semitism meet movements like «Fridays for Future» or «Black Lives Matter» and hovering over everything is the question of how we – after being driven out of paradise – want to live together, not least with regard to our relationship to nature, which is constantly desecrated by man. 

«Elfriede Jelinek resolutely reaches into the media, myths and mutations of life and presents it as a repulsively fascinating and distorting mirror panorama … as profound as it is ironic.» (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
«The amplification of a present-day polyphony which has become incomprehensible. Jelinek has always been unrivalled in describing such states of affairs.» (Der Standard)
«The real meaning of the play will only become clear when individual words have already disappeared … And perhaps then, in retrospect, we will understand much better what this ‹noise› has been. » (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung)