ZURICH. The new season at the Schauspielhaus Zurich opens not with a classic but with a wager: a trilogy on migration, three full-length evenings staged across the Schiffbau halls and the Pfauen, telling the story of departure, passage and arrival in Europe's richest and most guarded corner. On opening night, the queue outside the Schiffbau stretched past the Hardbrücke arches, and the applause, when it finally came, lasted long enough to become part of the story. Zurich's theatre has put the defining question of Swiss politics at the centre of its stage.
The trilogy's architecture is simple and merciless. The first evening follows a family's decision to leave; the second, the journey itself, staged in a cargo container built inside the Schiffbau's great hall; the third, the arrival, with its waiting rooms, its language tests and its small, hard-won mercies. The parts can be seen separately, but the full cycle, played on Saturdays, has become the season's hottest ticket.
The project grew out of two years of groundwork. Ensemble members ran workshops in Zurich's Kreis 4 and Kreis 5, collecting testimony from people who had made the journeys the trilogy stages, and the writing draws on hundreds of hours of recorded material. The premise was never in doubt: in a country where a quarter of residents are foreign nationals, migration is not a subject the theatre can visit; it is the ground the theatre stands on.
The scale of the production is possible only because of how Zurich funds its flagship stage. The city's subsidy, in the tens of millions of francs a year, underwrites an ensemble and a technical apparatus few European theatres can match, and the trilogy adds co-production money from partners in Vienna and Marseille. Ticket prices run from student standby to premium seats, with a solidarity scheme that has brought the workshop communities themselves into the auditorium.
The people on stage carry the material in their own biographies. The ensemble includes actors whose family histories span three continents, and the creative team worked with surtitles in English and Arabic from the first rehearsal, refusing the idea that the house's German-speaking audience is the only one in the room. The Schauspielhaus, for this production, has effectively redefined who its public is.
The critical response has been as divided as the subject, and the theatre would have it no other way. The feuilletons have argued for weeks over the second evening's unflinching middle hour; the audience talkbacks after the third have run long and occasionally tearful. School matinees, fully booked within days, may prove the trilogy's most durable legacy.
The house's leadership rejects the charge of topicality for its own sake. “Migration is not our subject here, it is our biography,” the artistic director says. The line has been quoted in every review, which is what happens when a theatre says out loud what its city already knows.
The trilogy's life will not end at the city boundary. Guest performances are planned in Geneva and Lugano, each with its own surtitle politics, and the production has already sharpened an old national argument: in a country of four languages, whose stories get told on the subsidised stages, and in whose words. The Schauspielhaus has answered, characteristically, by staging the argument itself.
The season builds outwards from the opening. The trilogy enters the rotating repertoire and stays there through the spring, a documentary film of the workshop process follows in the autumn, and the next premiere, a classic refracted through the same questions, is already in rehearsal on the Pfauen stage.
There is a longer tradition being claimed here. Zurich's theatre has form with the uncomfortable question, from the exile years when this city kept German-language drama alive to the postwar premieres of Dürrenmatt and Frisch, both of whom wrote, at bottom, about who belongs. The trilogy is the Schauspielhaus announcing that it means to keep that lease.
After the final bow, the audience spills onto Escher-Wyss-Platz, where the trams cross beneath the Hardbrücke lights. Half the languages of the trilogy can be heard on the pavement, which is, the theatre would say, the review that matters.