Babel

Theatre performance Babel by Elfriede Jelinek and Nicolas Stemann, programmed in Holland Festival 2007.
The Burgtheater from Vienna presents Babel, a text by the Austrian writer and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. For this militant left-wing feminist the events in the Abu-Ghraib prison and the revolution in Fallujah are the points of departure for an anthropological journey into the deepest abysses of humanity. An important element here is the interweaving of violence, sexuality and religion. Nicolas Stemann, one of Germany’s talented directors, had made Babel into a tragi¬comic essay in which the performance expands from one to three dimensions. He keeps the audience alert by continu¬ally putting them on the wrong track. He continually changes sets, jumping from a puppet theatre to a living room and then to a nightclub and then to a prison before returning the same way.