About the work
Indien is a tragicomedy by the Austrian cabaret artists Josef Hader and Alfred Dorfer, who wrote the play for themselves in 1991 and also played its two central characters; it was directed by Petra Dobetsberger. Ahead of the premiere, the pair presented the play in 1991 at the Treibhaus in Innsbruck. The characters speak Viennese dialect, one in a milder and the other in a coarser form.
Plot
Heinz Bösel, a taciturn, beer-drinking petit bourgeois, and the talkative, self-improving Kurt Fellner travel as inspectors checking inns in the provinces of Lower Austria. At first the two get thoroughly on each other's nerves, but after a boozy night full of confessions a genuine friendship grows between them. In the second half the comedy turns: Fellner falls ill with cancer, and Bösel stays by his side to the end. The idea of rebirth, as it is believed in India, gives the play its title.
Cultural significance
Hader and Dorfer received the main prize of the Austrian Kleinkunstpreis for Indien in 1992. Paul Harather's 1993 film version, whose screenplay the authors wrote with the director and in which they again played the leads, won the Max Ophüls Prize and the Austrian Film Prize, among others, and is among the best-known Austrian films. The play is still staged by other companies across the German-speaking world.