Emmy Werner returns to Vienna’s Volkstheater for Jelinek production

ORF reports that Emmy Werner is returning to Vienna’s Volkstheater theatre as a performing witness to history in Jan Philipp Gloger’s production of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Arrival. The premiere is scheduled for September 26.

According to a theatre statement, the 88-year-old will appear on stage as an “angel and warning voice”. Werner directed the Volkstheater from 1998 to 2005 and received a Nestroy Award for lifetime achievement in 2023.

“It is a huge joy and honour to have won Emmy Werner for this collaboration,” Gloger, the production’s director and the Volkstheater’s current director, was quoted as saying.

Gloger said Werner had experienced the Nazi era, the period after 1945 and the present day. He added that as exclusion, authoritarianism and anti-democratic ideas return, so must those who can discuss and warn against them.

In The Arrival, Gloger combines four works by Jelinek: Clouds.Home., Rechnitz: The Extermination Angel, The Silent Girl and The Farewell, No: The Arrival. The production is intended to create a large “structure of thought built from repression and return”.