Werner Schwab (4 February 1958 – 1 January 1994) was an

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

n playwright and visual artist.

Biography

From 1978 to 1982 he studied sculpture at the

Akademie der bildenden Künste The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (german: link=no, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien) is a public art school in Vienna, Austria. History The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna was founded in 1692 as a private academy modelled on the Accademia di Sa ...

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

. During the 1980s he worked as a sculptor and woodcutter. Schwab was a heavy drinker who was said to have written his plays late at night while listening to loud music (particularly the band

Einstürzende Neubauten (, 'Collapsing New Buildings') is a German experimental music group, formed in West Berlin in 1980. The group is currently composed of founding members Blixa Bargeld (lead vocals; guitar; keyboard) and N.U. Unruh ( custom-made instruments; p ...

, whom he was friends with). His body was found on New Year's Day 1994.

Work

Schwab's first play ''Die Präsidentinnen'' (sometimes translates as ''First Ladies'' or ''Holy mothers''), was produced at the Theater im Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 1990. Between then and his death four years later he wrote sixteen plays, eight of which were produced during his lifetime, making his career one of the briefest, most spectacular and most controversial in contemporary German-language

theatre Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...

. Schwab's work is close to the

grotesque Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...

genre. It extensively employed

scatology In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of feces. Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet (and thus where it has been), health and diseases s ...

and

sex Sex is the trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing animal or plant produces male or female gametes. Male plants and animals produce smaller mobile gametes (spermatozoa, sperm, pollen), while females produce larger ones ( ova, of ...

, with the peculiarity of exhibiting pulsions and taboos in a poetic framework.Jolly, Genevièv
''L'obscénité et la scène : le théâtre de Werner Schwab''
/ref> He renewed the tradition of

German Expressionism German Expressionism () consisted of several related creative movements in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin during the 1920s. These developments were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central ...

. His plays are full of images of surreal violence and degradation, and are firmly grounded within a native Austrian tradition of

Black comedy Black comedy, also known as dark comedy, morbid humor, or gallows humor, is a style of comedy that makes light of subject matter that is generally considered taboo, particularly subjects that are normally considered serious or painful to discu ...

. Schwab conceived theater as anti-bourgeois. He made use of textual collages and

intertextuality Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, Gerard Genette (1997) ''Paratexts'p.18/ref>Hal ...

. His 1995 play ''Troilluswahn und Cressidatheater'' is a rewriting of Shakespeare's ''

Troilus and Cressida ''Troilus and Cressida'' ( or ) is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1602. At Troy during the Trojan War, Troilus and Cressida begin a love affair. Cressida is forced to leave Troy to join her father in the Greek camp. Meanwh ...

'' into the

genre. Another characteristic of his texts is to exploit the

German language German ( ) is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is als ...

's capacity for

neologism A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...

to a remarkable degree. He is very difficult to translate, but amongst English-language dramatists, certain stylistic parallels might be drawn between his work and that of Steven Berkoff and

Enda Walsh Enda Walsh (born 1967) is an Irish playwright. Biography Enda Walsh was born in Kilbarrack, North Dublin on February 7, 1967. His father ran a furniture shop and his mother had been an actress. He is the second youngest of six children. Wal ...

. Vera San Payo de Lemos won the Austrian Prize for Literary Translation in 1998 and 2002 for her work in translating his work.

Awards and honors

*1992

Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis ("dramatist award of Mülheim"), founded in 1976, is one of the leading theater awards in Germany. It is awarded by an open jury of theater professionals, critics and playwrights who watch a short list of productions dur ...

Bibliography

Plays

* ''Die Präsidentinnen''. 1990. * ''Übergewicht, unwichtig: Unform. Ein europäisches Abendmahl''. 1991. * ''Volksvernichtung oder meine Leber ist sinnlos''. 1991. * ''Mein Hundemund''. 1992. * ''Mesalliance, aber wir ficken uns prächtig''. 1992.Steirische Gesellschaft für Kulturpolitik
/ref> * ''Der Himmel mein Lieb meine sterbende Beute''. 1992. * ''Offene Gruben und offene Fenster. Ein Fall von Ersprechen''. 1992. * ''Pornogeographie. Sieben Gerüchte''. 1993. * ''Endlich tot, endlich keine Luft mehr''. 1994. * ''Mariedl/Antiklima(x)''. 1994. * ''Faust:: Mein Brustkorb: Mein Helm''. 1994. * ''Troilluswahn und Cressidatheater''. 1995. * ''Eskalation ordinär. Ein Schwitzkastenschwank in sieben Affekten''. 1995.

Novel

* ''Joe Mc Vie alias Josef Thierschädl''. 1988 (first published 2007).

Books by Werner Schwab

* ''Fäkaliendramen''. (Droschl, 1991) * ''Königskomödien''. (Droschl, 1992) * ''Dramen III''. (Droschl, 1994) * ''Holy Mothers'', translation by Meredith Oakes of ''Die Präsidentinnen'' (Oberon, 1999) * ''An Anthology of Plays'', translated by Michael Mitchell (Ariadne Press, 1999) * People Annihilation or my Liver is Sick, translated by Michael Roloff riadne PressU.S. Premiere, Chicago, Trap Door Theatre, 2005

Sources

*Ulm Sanford, Gerlinde, Afterword to Schwab, ''An Anthology of Plays'' (Ariadne, 1999)

References

External links

Critical essay on Werner Schwab
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schwab, Werner 1958 births 1994 deaths Austrian male dramatists and playwrights Austrian artists Academy of Fine Arts Vienna alumni 20th-century Austrian dramatists and playwrights 20th-century Austrian male writers