About the work
"Lotfullah & die Staatsbürgerschaft" ("Lotfullah & Citizenship") is a participatory production of Vienna's Burgtheater, developed by the theatre's education department. At its centre is Lotfullah Yusufi, who fled alone to Austria in 2015 at the age of fifteen and has since performed at the Burgtheater and with the group SPIGL. The evening is explicitly not a refugee story but a Kafkaesque narrative about bureaucracy – about incomprehensible officialese, the value of citizenship and Lotfullah's remarkable perseverance, charm and humour.
Plot
Following Lotfullah's own path through the Austrian citizenship process, the production unfolds a cautionary tale about the grind of officialdom. Bureaucracy itself steps bodily onto the stage: embodied by Waltraud Matz, it celebrates itself in an aria as the "Queen of Power". A nine-member ensemble makes the procedure – its absurdities, its harshness, its endless loops – palpable. The narrative was developed by Lotfullah Yusufi together with director Anna Manzano, musician and performer Marie Theissing and set designer Magdalena Knor.
Cultural significance
The production combines documentary, biographical and participatory theatre into a form of civic education: with wit rather than pathos, it offers remedial lessons in empathy and bureaucracy, migration and integration. By bringing a directly affected person's own story to the stage of one of the most important German-language theatres, the evening shifts the perspective: the "case" becomes a human being with a voice, humour and judgement. "Lotfullah & die Staatsbürgerschaft" thus stands for a theatre that does not merely discuss social participation but practises it.