Spotlight on Literary Strategies of Multilingual (Post)migrant Drama in the Play The Situation

Abstract

Abstract Yael Ronen and Ensemble’s award-winning play and theatre production The Situation, first staged at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater in 2015, features monologues and dialogues spoken in Arabic, English, German, Hebrew and Russian (made accessible to audiences via German and English supertitles). My analysis interprets this multilingualism both as a literary strategy that creates fluid meanings and identities, and as a contribution to the decentring of German as the dominant language of the German theatre landscape. Combining a philological approach to multilingualism with insights gained through tools offered by theatre studies and cultural studies, the article also shows how the playwright and director’s poetic and dramaturgical strategies contribute to The Situation serving as an intervention that questions the ‘automatic’ coupling of linguistic with cultural, national and/or ethnic identities in a (post)migrant theatre created by artists with personal experiences of migration.