Nestroy für „Die vielen Stimmen meines Bruders“
Die Jurybegründung:
„Die Wiener Autorin Magdalena Schrefel schreibt in diesem Stück über ihren jüngeren Bruder Valentin Schuster, der mit einem extrem seltenen Gendefekt zur Welt kam. Er kann nicht gehen, und es ist absehbar, dass er sich bald nur noch mittels Sprachassistenz – also fremder Stimmen, die für ihn sprechen – artikulieren wird können. „Die vielen Stimmen meines Bruders“ ist ein kleines, klug gebautes Stück, in dem Schrefel stets auch den Vorgang selbst zum Thema macht: dass da eine Dramatikerin ein Drama über sich und ihren behinderten Bruder schreibt. Das Stimmen-Casting, das die beiden Geschwister veranstalten, ist die äußere Handlung eines Stücks, in dem es vor allem darum geht, wer für wen sprechen darf und wie. Und natürlich um das Leben mit Behinderung und Behinderten. „Was mich behindert“, sagt der Bruder, „sind die Bilder, die es von Behinderung gibt.“
Wolfgang Kralicek
https://www.nestroypreis.at/show_content2.php?s2id=627
Magdalena Schrefel and Valentin Schuster won the 2024 Nestroy Prize for Best Play, the Author’s Prize, for ‘Die vielen Stimmen meines Bruders’ (The Many Voices of My Brother). The award ceremony took place on 24 November 2024 in Vienna.
The co-production by Schauspielhaus Wien, Kunstfest Weimar and Kosmos Theater Wien has been invited to the No Limits Festival in Berlin, where it will be performed on 19 and 20 November.
Further guest performances in Bremen, Bern and other locations are in the planning stage.
Jury statement:
„In this play, Viennese author Magdalena Schrefel writes about her younger brother Valentin Schuster, who was born with an extremely rare genetic defect. He cannot walk, and it is foreseeable that he will soon only be able to communicate with the help of speech assistance – i.e. foreign voices speaking for him. ‘Die vielen Stimmen meines Bruders’ (My Brother’s Many Voices) is a short, cleverly constructed play in which Schrefel consistently addresses the process itself: that a playwright is writing a drama about herself and her disabled brother. The voice casting organised by the two siblings is the external plot of a play that is primarily about who is allowed to speak for whom and how. And, of course, about life with disabilities and disabled people. ‘What hinders me,’ says the brother, ‘are the images that exist of disability.’
Wolfgang Kralicek
About the play:
Inclusive sibling story with drama, puppets and music
A brother and his sister are holding a voice casting. The brother will need a new voice. A genetic defect causes his own to give up the ghost. Together they set out to find a voice with which he can continue to speak. Or rather: many voices! One for every imaginable situation in life. And his sister? She writes down everything that is involved in the search for a new voice: the right sentences and the wrong questions. Plus all the thoughts about what it means to write what others say and to speak what others have written. Her brother wants one thing above all: not only to borrow voices, but also the right to raise them. And himself along with it. So the two take off together to find out what else is possible.
The author Magdalena Schrefel, who was recently awarded the Robert Walser Prize, takes her own family constellation as the starting point for her play about the longings and fantasies, the fear and the hope that a sister and her brother can share. Marie Bues and Anouschka Trocker stage this sibling story with voice recordings from the radio play produced in parallel in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk Kultur and Ö1. The result is a stage version with actors with and without disabilities who lend their bodies to the many voices. Marie Bues returns to the Kunstfest for the third time, following her world premieres of texts by Sivan Ben Yishai (2020) and Thomas Köck (2021).