Where is the woman’s place in the fabric of power? Where are the female bodies within the revolution? Elfriede Jelinek is angry and she calls for theatrical terror, for a revolution of daughters against their fathers, for a savage assault on bourgeois representational theatre. Once again, she maliciously invokes the spirits of the past to join her for a séance. In reminiscence of Schiller’s tragedy, the Scottish ruler Mary Stuart and her English rival Elizabeth I face each other in a royal dispute about the interpretational sovereignty over the political discourse and about the (im)possibility of political action. Schiller’s queens are superimposed by icons of left-wing terror: Ulrike Meinhof as Mary Stuart and Gudrun Ensslin as Elizabeth. A polyphonic play on female identity ensues, and the contours of the historical sources become blurred.

The inner conflict of female identity, torn between self-discovery, public life, political work and family unites Jelinek’s women across various periods of history. Full of life, they hold endlessly looping monologues through uninterrupted blocks of text and vast expanses of language. They mix low- and high-brow literature with documentary quotes, word games and puns with trash talk and the informational floods of the media age. And the fervour of their speech is limitless. The time for silencing women is up.

Jelinek’s women of power are no embodiments of reconstructed historical biographies; instead, they represent a persistent drilling through history to find archaic patterns of political sovereignty and the absence of the female body in politics. The German prison of Stammheim and the English dungeon become the fatal battleground of emancipation, the political stage of gender and power. In Jelinek’s play, the stage does not belong to men, but rather to the queens of pop who exchange verbal blows on the catwalk of the media-informed public sphere.