Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 30.11.2005

Markus Bauer introduces "Club 8", a group of authors based in Iasi in eastern Romania who are challenging the Bucharest establishment. "Dan Lungu's poetry and his caustic, satirical book of stories 'Cheta la flegm' (alms of spit) are written in the colloquial lingo of the youth. Mariana Codrut, too, was initially know for her poems. Her first novel 'The House with the Yellow Curtains' (1998) describes the life of the young people in terse, realistic prose. For her characters, day-to-day life in Iasi in the 1980s is hardly different from the first years of the post-revolutionary epoch. The first major conflict with 'Uniunea Scriitorilor', the Romanian writer's association, broke out in 1998 and caused a furore in Romanian literary circles when members of 'Club 8' made public the inequitable distribution of state funds."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30.11.2005

The Kammerspiele in Munich has performed works by several young playwrights. As Bernd Noack writes, that does not always mean the authors' dreams have come true: "Anja Hilling sits on the stage in the studio of the Munich Kammerspiele and says: 'I could have sunk into my seat.' Shaking her head, she tells of how she recently attended the premiere of her latest play 'Monsoon' in Cologne, and that she hardly recognised her text. To top it off, the play was panned by the critics. Hilling puts the entire blame for the flop on how the play was staged, saying that all of the nuances and innuendos in the dialogues were ironed out. Young dramatists' faith in the theatre seems to be shaken to the core."


Die Tageszeitung, 30.11.2005

Daniel Bax reports from Beirut, where the Homeworks Festival is now taking place for the third time. Bax reports that the festival is developing into the most important forum for Arab artists in a scene that is experiencing a veritable renaissance. "While the scars in the cityscape gradually disappear under concrete, the less visible wounds of the civil war remain a central theme for many Lebanese artists. In the play 'Who's Afraid of Representation', the actors Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué have worked through the case of Hassan Maamoum, a former militia head who brought about a massacre among his colleagues." But Bax expresses doubts about the extent to which the festival reaches a broader public: "That a play like 'Who's Afraid of Representation', with its provocative and sexually explicit language, fails to excite any protest in Beirut is presumably not due to overwhelming tolerance or liberalism in the city. It's much more likely that the conservative public doesn't even catch wind of the festival."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30.11.2005

Christopher Schmidt describes the "ice age" that has set in on the Berlin theatre scene in the chilly winter of 2005. Director of the Schaubühne Thomas Ostermeier, whose theatre recently lost a creative director, the choreographer Sasha Waltz, due to funding cuts, tells Schmidt how theatre can change lives. "Ostermeier says that he is often asked why he doesn't reform which in fact means, 'throw a few people out!' Then he tells of an audience member who, after seeing 'Nora', decided to leave her husband. And when the going got tough and she had to psyche herself up for the meeting with the lawyer, she went and saw the play again. She was editor at a publishing house, now she's writing soap operas."