Der große Marsch (The Great March)

“Most theatre people (of course there are exceptions) are arseholes.” With this dedication the author begins his ’Great March’ through all the clichéd critiques of capitalism and entrenched points of view which have prevailed within the German theatre in recent years to become new standards. In the end he clears the way for a new, radical, anarchic, poetic and also helpless view of the world which tries to shake off all our expectations of art and the standardization of political discourse in order to conquer new ground.

The form of the play is a revue, powerful and extremely funny. An aggressive, politically correct and idiotic actress leads us through the evening. Subjects and guests include the Red Army Faction, Horst Mahler, Josef Ackermann, employers’ president Hundt, Bakunin, Hamlet, Prometheus, the author himself together with his mother, “reality“ in the form of a group of people living off social security, the wish for immortality and a beautiful and unspectacular poem.

Lotz explodes the resources of the possible and exhausts the theatre with all its possibilities and impossibilities. His idiosyncratic form appears to be practically unperformable and will force any creative team into a tough confrontation with the author and the text. Anyone who directs this play will have to have a lot of ideas – they will basically have to reinvent the theatre all over again. This fills the reader with joy at the prospect of all those productions which anyone will dare to create in the years to come!
Falk Richter

Wolfram Lotz was born in 1981 in Hamburg and studied Literature, Art and Media Studies in Constance. He began studying at the German Creative Writing Program Leipzig in 2007 and is one of the editors of their annual anthology “Tippgemeinschaft”. He is also co-founder and co-editor of the literary magazine Minima. He has written screenplays, essays, short stories, poems and the radio play “Ants Forever”. He received the Austrian town of Steyr’s Literary Prize in 2005 and the Rottweil Writer in Residence Award for 2009.