World-class playwright

Peter Turrini: “Theater, place of my refuge”

Celebrating his 80th birthday: Peter Turrini

(Bild: APA/HERBERT NEUBAUER)

Peter Turrini, Austria's most frequently performed playwright, celebrates his 80th birthday today. During his stay in hospital, however, he dictated scenes from a new play. 

No hurricane can drive me out of this lifelong place of refuge, the theater," confessed Peter Turrini, one of Austria's most brilliant playwrights. Since the 1970s, he has written theater history, first with razor-sharp social criticism and provocative folk plays, but in recent years also with conciliatory texts that confront human situations with humor.

Today (September 26), the "dramatic fever head", born in 1944 in the Carinthian Lavanttal, son of an Italian cabinetmaker and a Styrian domestic worker, celebrates his 80th birthday. The singer Maja Weis-Ostborn and the composer Gerhard Lampersberg brought the fifteen-year-old into their home and, as he says, "helped him find his way into art". 

Scandalous plays quickly made him famous 
He has lived as a freelance writer since 1971: the premieres of his dialect plays "Rozznjogd" and "Sauschlachten" and the TV series "Alpensaga" made him a star author who went on a US university reading tour with Helmut Qualtinger and H. C. Artmann. He became a member of the Graz Authors' Assembly. Politically engaged as a "critical contemporary", he appeared as a "fire-bellied toad" in the "Press Conference of the Animals" in the run-up to the occupation of the Hainburger Au in 1984, contributed a provocative speech to the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Republic on Heldenplatz, etc.

The balance of his work: enormous! He wrote more than three dozen plays, including successes such as "Josef und Maria", "Die Bürger von Wien", "Die Minderleister", with which he became a Burgtheater author under Claus Peymann in 1988, followed by "Tod und Teufel", "Alpenglühen", "Endlich Schluß", "Liebe in Madagaskar"

Herbert Föttinger brought him to Josefstadt, for which he still writes today. He has written three opera libretti - for example for Friedrich Cerha's "Der Riese vom Steinfeld" (2002). 14 screenplays have been made into films. There are 55 book editions. 

Good plays must be irritating
"A good play should be a tear, an irritation, a pain": Turrini's credo proves him right. His provocative "Images of Austria Today" made him one of the most frequently performed and translated authors.

Turrini has now had to stay in hospital for several months. In an interview, he said that although his pain could be alleviated, Parkinson's kept catching up with him. But in order not to despair, he "took a dictation machine with him and quietly dictated scenes from a new play".

Kommentar

„Skandalautor“ und Klassiker

Peter Turrini! A name that has long been an icon on the international theater scene. To premiere a play by him - from the Burg to the Berliner Ensemble - is an honor today. When Turrini premiered his angry debut play "Rozznjagd" at the Volkstheater in 1971, it caused a scandal. Audiences and politicians - outraged! "You should be flogged," someone shouted from the stalls. And when Dolores Schmidinger bared her breasts on stage, some shouted "filth". And a year later, Turrini's "Sauschlachten" at the Münchner Kammerspiele triggered furious protests. Everyone who witnessed these premieres back then remembers them fondly today: they were there when Turrini celebrated his breakthrough. When he gave the stale entertainment theater a slap in the face, politicizing theater with criticism of the garbage of civilization and consumerism. And paved the way for playwrights such as Werner Schwab or English theater such as Ravenhill's "Shoppen & Ficken" or Sarah Kane in Vienna.

Turrini's plays are performed from New York to São Paulo or Seoul. He has written theater history. The "scandal author" became a classic.