About the work
Werner Schwab's grotesque chamber play was premiered in 1990 at the Künstlerhaus Vienna and made the then 32-year-old author famous overnight. It is regarded as his best-known work and as a classic of late-20th-century Austrian folk theatre. Schwab developed an idiosyncratic idiom that transformed repressed Biedermeier, Catholic oppression and brutal directness into a unique theatrical language — the so-called "Schwab German".
Plot
Three women — Erna, Grete and Mariedl — sit in Erna's kitchen after the papal television broadcast. Erna, a pious sausage-factory worker. Grete, a bigoted widow who secretly dreams of the butcher. Mariedl, a Catholic lavatory-attendant original who casts herself as an expert on blocked toilets and papal audiences. In a delirious dialogue they spin fantasies of the future that waver between kitchen and Vatican, sausage cauldron and divine grace. When the fantasies tip over and the repressed aggressions break out, the evening ends in excess: Mariedl is beaten to death, her head ending up in the bucket.
Cultural significance
Die Präsidentinnen is among the most-performed Austrian plays of recent decades and is the central work of the so-called Schwab renaissance. Productions in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich brought the theatre world a new form of grotesque characterisation that influenced Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek and German directorial aggression alike. Werner Schwab died in 1994 at the age of 35 — the play became a monument to his dark genius.