The Main Thing Is Work!

Last updated

The Main Thing Is Work! (German:Hauptsache Arbeit!) is a satirical play written by the Swiss author and influential playwright Sibylle Berg. [1] [2] [3] [4] The play had its premiere at Die Staatstheater Stuttgart. [5]

Contents

Theme

The play takes place on a boat centering around an insurance companies party, which turns into a game show highlighting the blatant absurdity of much waged work. [6]

A pair of rats comment, interrupt as well as seem to orchestrate the turn of events, while taking on the role of narrators in a brechtian style. The rats are responsible for a kind of Milgram experiments of work with electric shocks being administered to the workers. [7]

Some of the characters include: an abusive boss, a workaholic obsessed with fitness and performance, a HR-representative with Stockholm syndrome, an alienated and indifferent office worker, a female wage worker who has given up on everything in life except good food and a woman who gets sexually harassed by her boss, etc.

The play is a reflection about what the work that most people conduct means, how it affects, and controls our lives. In short, what work does to us. [8]

The tone is cynical, and there is a large variety and amount of stories presented which dismantles usual narratives justifying peoples relation to work and the common logic of our working situations. This leaves the audience with a sense of disarmament and ruin, creating a new space of possibility for something else to fill that void of thought. The play mainly criticizes meaningless work, the taken for granted 40 hour work week, the way we often come to identify with the social role one takes on at work, and how it dominates peoples lives and lifetime and structure peoples sense of what's imaginable and attainable.

Reception

The theater critic Cecilia Djurberg wrote that "If I had not already left this soulsucking work culture behind me, I would have needed a serious trigger warning before I saw the Swedish premiere of Sibylle Bergs work life satire The Main Thing Is Work! That's how heavy flashbacks it gives me." [9]

The theater critic Ingegärd Waaranperä called the play "A thriller-comedy about works demeaning and characteristic elements. It's both unsettling and fun." [10]

The chief dramaturge Bochow of Die Staatstheater Stuttgart considered "the insurance employees [to] stand for a psychogram of an entire society." [11]

See also

Sources

  1. ↑ Halter, Martin. "Theater: "Hauptsache Arbeit": Ratten auf dem singenden Schiff". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN   0174-4909 . Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  2. ↑ Ring, Lars (2022-03-20). "Skarp satir om hur jobb kan äta upp livet". Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish). ISSN   1101-2412 . Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  3. ↑ "Dystopisk firmafest med glada partyhattar". www.aftonbladet.se (in Swedish). 20 March 2022. Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  4. ↑ "Otäck och rolig pjäs om det nya arbetslivet". DN.SE (in Swedish). 2022-03-20. Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  5. ↑ Germany, Stuttgarter Zeitung, Stuttgart. "Stuttgarter Staatstheather: Hauptsache Arbeit!". stuttgarter-zeitung.de (in German). Retrieved 2022-03-29.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. ↑ Online, FOCUS. "Sibylle Bergs böse Parabel "Hauptsache Arbeit"". FOCUS Online (in German). Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  7. ↑ Halter, Martin. "Theater: "Hauptsache Arbeit": Ratten auf dem singenden Schiff". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN   0174-4909 . Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  8. ↑ "Jobbet, framför allt!". 2022-03-27. Archived from the original on 27 March 2022. Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  9. ↑ "Dystopisk firmafest med glada partyhattar". www.aftonbladet.se (in Swedish). 20 March 2022. Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  10. ↑ "Otäck och rolig pjäs om det nya arbetslivet". DN.SE (in Swedish). 2022-03-20. Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  11. ↑ Online, FOCUS. "Sibylle Bergs böse Parabel "Hauptsache Arbeit"". FOCUS Online (in German). Retrieved 2022-03-29.

Related Research Articles

Heinz Leymann was a Swedish academic, famous for his studies on mobbing among humans. He held a degree in pedagogical psychology, and another one in psychiatry and worked as a psychologist. He was a professor at Umeå University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sibylle Berg</span> Swiss author and playwright (born 1962)

Sibylle Berg is a German-Swiss contemporary author and playwright. They write novels, essays, short fiction, plays, radio plays, and columns. Their 16 books have been translated into 30 languages. They have won numerous awards, including the Thüringer Literaturpreis, the Bertolt-Brecht-Literaturpreis, and the Johann-Peter-Hebel-Preis. They have become an iconic figure in German alternative sub-cultures, gaining a large fan base among the LGBT community and the European artistic communities. They live in Switzerland and Israel. Their 2019 work GRM. Brainfuck, a science fiction novel set in a dystopian near future won the Swiss Book Prize and was noticed by The Washington Post, and reached fourth place on the Spiegel Bestseller list, with the sequel, RCE, entering the list as highest entry of the week at place 14. On 1 March 2023 Berg was invited as special guest to open the high-profile Elevate Festival in Graz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Schleich</span>

Schleich is a German producer of hand painted toy figurines and accessories. The company is headquartered in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany. In 2020, the group employed 440 people and generated sales of 188.7 million euros. Half of the sales are generated outside of the German domestic market, and Schleich branded play figurines and playsets are sold in over 60 countries. In 2022, the company sold a total of approximately 40 million figurines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeton Neziraj</span>

Jeton Neziraj is a playwright from Kosovo. He was the Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Kosovo and now he is the Director of Qendra Multimedia, a cultural production company based in Prishtina.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boris Palmer</span> German politician (born 1972)

Boris Erasmus Palmer is a German politician and former member of the Green Party. He has been mayor of Tübingen since January 2007. From March 2001 to May 2007, he was a member of the Baden-Württemberg Landtag, the State parliament in Stuttgart.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aris Fioretos</span> Swedish writer

Aris Fioretos is a Swedish writer, translator and scholar of Greek and Austrian extraction who writes in Swedish, German and English. Aside from his own literary career, he is also Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University and a member of both the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung and the Akademie der Künste.

<i>Opernwelt</i> German opera magazine

Opernwelt is a monthly German magazine for opera, operetta and ballet. It includes news about current performances, portraits of composers and performers, articles about opera houses, performance spaces, and contemporary and historical subjects from the world of opera and classical music. It reviews recordings and books and publishes monthly schedules of German and international opera houses. The magazine's website offers full text search for past issues. A year book is published every October.

Kaj Steveman is a Swedish visual effects supervisor. He was the Founder and head of Fido Film, one of Sweden's most prominent special effects studios and is most known for his acclaimed work on the Swedish vampire films Let the Right One In and Frostbite. He was also visual effects supervisor for Underworld: Awakening and Storm and worked as assistant director in the cult film Evil Ed. He worked as a make-up artist on The Hunters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosenstein Tunnel</span> Tunnels in Baden-Württemberg, Germany

The Rosenstein tunnel is the name of several past, present and planned tunnels in the Stuttgart metropolitan area, in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. Today it is a railway tunnel under Rosenstein Park to Bad Cannstatt. It now connects the Fils Valley Railway (Filstalbahn) from Stuttgart Central Station (Hauptbahnhof) to the Rosenstein Bridge over the Neckar to Bad Cannstatt station.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eva Rydberg</span> Swedish entertainer

Eva Gunilla Johansson Rydberg is a Swedish singer, actress, comedian, revue-artist and dancer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bianca Ingrosso</span> Swedish blogger, social influencer, entrepreneur, and singer

Bianca Melina Elisabeth Wahlgren Ingrosso is a Swedish blogger, social influencer, entrepreneur, and singer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ola Källenius</span> Swedish business executive (born 1969)

Sten Ola Källenius is a Swedish-German business executive. He is the chairman of the board of management of Mercedes-Benz Group, and CEO of Mercedes-Benz. He was the first non-German in both positions before he took up German citizenship.

Vi gå över daggstänkta berg is a Swedish folk song, whose lyrics was written by Olof Thunman. The melody is of disputed origin, but is attributed to Edwin Ericsson.

Nico Sauer is a German composer, performance artist and multimedia artist.

il Gusto Barocco is an orchestra specialising in early music and historical performance practice with its headquarters in Stuttgart.

Hasko Weber is a German actor and theatre director.

Melodifestivalen 2023 was the 63rd edition of the Swedish music competition Melodifestivalen, which was organised by Sveriges Television (SVT) and took place over a six-week period between 4 February and 11 March 2023. The winner of the competition was Loreen with the song "Tattoo", who went on to win the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 for Sweden. All shows were hosted by Farah Abadi and Jesper Rönndahl.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bavaria–Baden-Württemberg rivalry</span> Regional rivalry between two German federal states

The rivalry between the German federal states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the nation's second- and third-most populous states behind North Rhine-Westphalia, respectively, is a rhetorical rivalry especially regarding their economies and culture.

Axel Meise is a German entrepreneur and designer. Meise is the founder and chief designer of Occhio, a lighting and design company based in Germany.

Tilmann Köhler is a German theatre stage director who has worked with the ensembles of the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar and the Staatsschauspiel Dresden. His broad repertoire includes classical plays and world premiered. Several of his productions have been invited to international festivals. Köhler turned to also staging operas in 2013, beginning with Handel's Teseo at the Oper Frankfurt, where he returned to direct Martin's Le Vin herbé, Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Zemlinsky's Der Traumgörge.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.