Theater of the Void

Theater of the Void explores contemporary German theater in the aftermath of the technology of the atomic bomb. Informed by threats of total annihilation—whether through nuclear technology or, more recently, global warming—German-language theater since the late 1970s encounters the void not as empty space or nothingness but as the possibility of radical transformation. Theater of the Void investigates theatrical forms that transform fundamental categories of time, space, and causality in light of the ontological and epistemological shifts of the nuclear age.

Teresa Kovacs focuses on four directors and playwrights whose works offer insights into the theater of the void: Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Schlingensief, and René Pollesch. Kovacs shows that contemporary German theater has not turned away from the sciences after Hiroshima and Nagasaki but has remained entangled with scientific thinking about quantum physics, biology, and the environment. Investigating these entanglements, Theater of the Void finds in the works of these German theater-makers a grammar of the void that speaks to the possibilities of a transformed theater in the Anthropocene.

Teresa Kovacs is Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Drama als Störung.

Drawing on the writings of Catherine Malabou and Karen Barad, two theorists of the void, Teresa Kovacs describes the function of nothingness as the grounds for thinking and agency beyond pessimism. Theater of the Void challenges the skepticism and critique of postdramatic theater by explaining its radical potential to transform theater and its relationship to the audience.

Olivia Landry, author of Theatre of Anger:

Theater of the Void presents a rigorous and radically new paradigm of contemporary German-language theater that complements the existing concept of postdramatic theater. By linking theater to discourses of science, catastrophe, the nonhuman, and futurity, this book is exceedingly timely and illuminating.