Miscellaneous New Play theater festival aims to overcome language barriers
A new festival is being launched in Zurich: Play aims to be a platform for contemporary theater and at the same time overcome the borders between the Swiss language regions.
07.05.2026, 10:01
SDA
Over the course of three days (7-10 May), audiences will be able to join playwrights, directors, actresses and young theater professionals from all over Switzerland to discover how polyphonic and immediately topical theater is.
"In contrast to books, theater can react much more quickly to the present," says festival co-director Philine Erni to the Keystone-SDA news agency. But you can't buy theater in bookstores; if you want to discover plays, you have to see them. Play wants to offer this opportunity - "in a concentrated form", says Erni.
At the heart of the festival is a play competition, which ends on Sunday with the awarding of a jury prize and an audience prize. The jury prize is endowed with CHF 10,000, the audience prize with CHF 5,000. Eight texts from the last two years in German, French or Italian have been nominated. They include authors such as Sarah Calörtscher, Heinz Helle, Iris Keller and Laura Leupi. Prisca Agustoni is there from Ticino and Lou Lepori from French-speaking Switzerland.
Short half-hour versions of their plays can be seen on the stage of the Neumarkt Theater on Friday and Saturday. Teams from theaters all over Switzerland will travel to the event: in addition to Theater Neumarkt, they will come from the Lucerne Theatre, Theater St. Gallen, Theater Basel, Bühnen Bern, the Ticino training laboratory Prismi/Luminanza, Théatre du Loup from Geneva and the team "Das Archiv".
Many of the competition entries were "decidedly multilingual", says Philine Erni. For example, French or Italian-German, as well as Turkish dialect. Erni recognizes a new self-confidence in this, namely that people are also writing in "supposed minority languages" and that there is an examination of the fact that "our reality is multilingual", with all the hurdles, qualities and misunderstandings that can arise.
Conquering the stage with theater karaoke
In addition to the play competition, Play offers formats for professionals and events for the audience, from panels to latenights. On Saturday evening, the audience can even conquer the stage with a theater karaoke. Top theater hits, from Sibylle Berg to Dürrenmatt or Tell's Apfelschuss by Schiller, will be read together with members of the Schauspielhaus Zürich ensemble. Erni promises a "fun factor, but also very serious scenes".
Behind the Play festival on the board are the writer and theater man Lukas Bärfuss, the Graubünden author Gianna Olinda Cadonau, the Zurich theater woman Sabine Harbeke, the Basel theater and performance artist Ariane Koch and the author Marina Skalova, who was born in Moscow and lives in Geneva.
This year's edition of Play is the first official one. Last year, Bühnen Bern already hosted an edition. Next year, Play will take place in Biel/Bienne. Theater professionals can already submit their texts.
One of the reasons why this festival should exist at all is that "the points of contact between the different language areas are very limited in the theater," says Erni. The German-speaking and French-speaking regions generally produce very different theater. This means that discoveries can be made at Play, "even pre-selected in the competition by a five-member jury", Erni advertises.
