In the 1980s, the plays of Heiner Müller und Elfriede Jelinek stood out as a radical break with dramatic conventions such as character, narrative context, and the creation of fictitious scenes. Against the backdrop of a new concept of language and theatre, the plays of three prominent contemporary playwrights – Werner Fritsch, Rainald Goetz and Sarah Kane – are subjected to in-depth analysis…

…Anna Opel hypothesises that in these contemporary scripts, the character as a psychological or individual being is dispelled by formations which are abstractly conceived and, above all, linguistically motivated. One of the aims of this research was to determine the consequences of this break with tradition for current theatre aesthetics.