About the work
One-act curtain-raiser by Johann Nestroy, first performed on 15 December 1827 at the Graz court theatre, where the young actor was engaged at the time. Nestroy wrote it as a prologue to Louis Angely's farce 'Zwölf Mädchen in Uniform' and had it performed seven more times in Graz through 1831.
Plot
A house steward and his servant Andres wait for the evening's freshly printed playbill and trade barbs about taste, criticism and the audience while they do. The brief piece is built as a play within a play and turns the theatre itself, its playbills and its public into the object of its mockery.
Cultural significance
'Der Zettelträger Papp' is among Nestroy's earliest surviving stage texts from his Graz years, and its theatre satire anticipates a motif he would return to throughout his career: the theatre laughing at itself.