About the work
“The Monster” is the stage version of the novel of the same name by the Danish author and performer Madame Nielsen, published by Gyldendal in 2018 under its English title and released in German in 2020 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in a translation by Hannes Langendörfer. For the Volkstheater in Vienna it became a live radio play performance that Madame Nielsen directs and performs herself (premiere October 2026, Rote Bar). It carries the subtitle “Selbstauslöschung 2” (Self-Erasure 2); the first part of the series is “Lamento”.
Plot
New York in the winter of 1993: a young European with no money and nowhere to stay wants to make it on stage and dreams of following Willem Dafoe, whose company, the Wooster Group, he is looking for. His only asset is a list of telephone numbers. A call in search of a place to sleep draws him into a sealed-off counterworld of strange rituals, art and madness, in which it becomes unclear what is really happening and what is staged.
Cultural significance
The novel draws on Madame Nielsen’s own time in New York, where, then still as Claus Beck-Nielsen, she belonged to the Wooster Group. German-language critics received the book very differently, ranging from praise for its satirical edge to outright rejection.