‘As a playwright, it feels wrong to make another play with five male characters and only one woman’

Marius von Mayenburg (50), the playwright, dramatist and director at Berlin’s prestigious Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, has closely observed the marriages of friends during holidays. It inspired him to write EXwhich, in addition to the pressure experienced by families with children, viciously illustrates the threat of an affair.

“I have the feeling that all families have the same problems,” he says during a video call from his apartment in Berlin. “They are not caused by us being a man, a woman, or a bad person. The problems in marriages arise because of pressure from society, which does not provide us with a new model for dividing family work and professional work. We have to deal with this more creatively and put pressure on the companies we work for.’

In September 2021 went EX premiered at the Rikstheater in Stockholm, directed by Von Mayenburg. A day later, Albert Lubbers, the artistic director and director of the Almere based company Suburbia, saw the script. Lubbers: ‘I was immediately blown away by the opening scene with the couple, in which the man receives a phone call from his ex. It shows so incredibly well how people talk to each other and not say what they want to say.’ After some doubts about whether it is not too radical and modern for the public, Lubbers decided to acquire the rights at the urging of his colleagues. Now is EX on display outside Sweden for the first time.

Although the family drama is staged in an open barn on the Almere city estate De Kemphaan, the couple creates EX, played by Ali-Ben Horsting and Hanne Arendzen, a claustrophobic atmosphere. When the architect comes home from work, his wife, a doctor, is glued to her laptop on the couch. The children are asleep, he can heat up the leftover lasagna himself. There is no longer any intimacy, all the more with controlled anger. And then the real fireworks, sparked by an unexpected sleepover by an ex-girlfriend, played by Alejandra Theus, have yet to begin.

When we ask Von Mayenburg whether that oppressive atmosphere has arisen from the corona pandemic (he wrote the script in the spring of 2020), he answers adamantly no. ‘I deliberately tried not to write about corona and the lockdown. One experiences this drama, being stuck together in a situation like the characters in EXmuch longer.’

Von Mayenburg, who comes from Munich, claims to be obsessed with conflict, the driving force behind some twenty plays that he wrote in a quarter of a century. After studying at the University of the Arts in Berlin, he broke through with his play fire sight (1998), in which an incestuous sister and a brother with a penchant for arson make the lives of their ‘normal’ parents miserable. The anti-bourgeois sentiment, the unpleasant characters and the physical violence in fire sight shook up the German theater world. It has been awarded several literature prizes and has been on stage from London to Tokyo.

Von Mayenburg continued to deepen violence, as in the performance parasites (2000), in which an abused woman is brought into the house by a couple of freeloaders. ‘In those early days I thought that theater should be about life and death. I was also interested in how far I could go with physical action and the end point of a conflict. That has changed a bit, I’m not so obsessed with violence in a physical way anymore. I think there is also a lot of violence in language.’

Today, Von Mayenburg is seen as a playwright who can join the ranks of enfants terribles such as the English Mark Ravenhill (56) and Sarah Kane (1971-1999). In recent years he has provoked in his pieces, which have been translated into more than thirty languages, mainly with his frank social critique. As in satirical Stuck Plastic (2015), in which he exposes the hypocrisy of a left-liberal family operating in the elite art world. His criticism of the elite also comes across in Ex: When the ex-girlfriend, who works in a pet store, comes to stay, she is brutally pointed out by the snobbish doctor about her disadvantaged position.

Von Mayenburg also breaks his head about this in his field. ‘In Germany, theaters are heavily subsidized and they receive a lot of money from working people, but many of them never come to the theater. I think theaters should start thinking about how to attract a wider and less academic audience, and that makers should be more open to people with different experiences and backgrounds. We can all learn and benefit from that. As a playwright, it also feels wrong to me to do another play with five male characters and only one female. A few years ago I would never have thought about it, but now when I introduce a new character I think: could this also be a woman?’