Fast Forward 2024

Productions by Fast Forward Prize Winners at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden

The Fast Forward Festival Jury Prize has consequences: it comes with an invitation to stage a new production at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden. British director Jaz Woodcock-Stewart (Fast Forward Prize Winner 2021) and Lithunian director Laura Kutkaitė (Fast Forward Prize Winner 2022) each have a production in the Staatsschauspiel’s repertoire during the 23/24 theatre season.

JASON MEDEA MEDLEY
by Jaz Woodcock-Stewart and Ensemble
How do you split up when you share so many things that can’t be divided in two? What does splitting-up mean for everything that you’ve created together? When can we start to think about forgiveness – for mistakes and hurtful behaviour? Is forgiveness even possible? And how do anger and revenge come into it, as the last possible emotions?
In her production CIVILISATION, with which she won the Jury Prize at Fast Forward 2021 and was invited to the festival Radikal Jung at the Münchner Volkstheater in 2022, Jaz Woodcock-Stewart already circled around the “emptiness that opens up after the loss of a loved one”, for which she found “a form to eloquently talk about a catastrophe for which there are no words” – according to the jury’s statement. In JASON MEDEA MEDLEY, together with an ensemble of four and a string quartet, she asks what the portents of a break-up are and under what conditions we can continue our lives afterwards – using the motif of the mythological couple Medea and Jason, while at the same time examining the conflicts that dominate our times, not just in private relationships.
On 27 September, 30 October and in November 2023 in the Kleines Haus 2

JUDITH SHAKESPEARE – RAPE AND REVENGE
by Paula Thielecke
Judith Shakespeare has had enough of only coming up with ideas for her famous brother. She wants to finally be heard as an author in her own right. After she manages to swap William’s phone number for an appointment with an artistic director of a theatre, he senses success: what will happen when only her last name is on the poster? He commissions her to write a play about rape culture, without realising that in the end patriarchy will destroy itself.
Paula Thielecke’s play elaborates on Virginia Woolf’s thought experiment that Shakespeare might have had a talented sister and transports this character into the present with fast-paced dialogues, feminist references and a chorus of survivors. Laura Kutkaitė, winner of the Fast Forward Prize in 2022 with her play THE SILENCE OF THE SIRENS, makes her directorial debut at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden and once again takes a look at the question of why stories about unchallenged violence against women still shape our culture.
From the 2nd of March 2024 in the Kleines Haus 1