Five one-act plays about six “princesses”, whose deaths are well known from fairy-tales, music, literature and the media, are called on to speak. “Snow White” strays through the forest “in search of truth,” soon wishing she had never seen the wood for the trees; she is an easy target for the hunter who murders her there. “Sleeping Beauty” is woken by Mr. Right’s kiss but quickly freezes up when faced with imminent mating. In “Rosamunde” “a princess speaks from her home far away in the wilderness, (…) who indulges in delusions of grandeur and in her own writing (…) and who somehow manages to survive after all.” (Elfriede Jelinek). “Jackie” on the other hand, a glamorous ex-First Lady, drags herself onto the stage with a whole host of corpses, where sardonically she reviews her life and that of the famous, dead Marilyn, her husband’s lover. In “The Wall” two female icons of writing, Ingeborg (Bachmann) and Sylvia (Plath) celebrate a ritual slaughtering. A long way from conventional stories of victims and perpetrators, Jelinek’s “Princess Dramas” are a sort of power and mentality history of the sexes, written with an unflinching gaze, unorthodox, bitterly serious and disarmingly self-mocking.
