Swedish director and playwright Mattias Anderson had a question for the people of Vienna: ‘Is there a particular event in your life you would want to see performed?’ In collaboration with the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna, almost a hundred interviews were conducted with participants representing a socio-economic cross-section of the city's population to then create a performance from the answers. The life events that were chosen range from the banal and funny to the existential and dramatic and reveal a truly pluralistic and polyphonic panorama of the city. Myths of Everyday Life lets the people of Vienna become the authors of their own myth as, together with the Volkstheater ensemble, Mattias Andersson condenses the collected material into a theatre production that is moving, heterogenous, comical and surprising. Dealing with the questions and power games of reality and fiction, true stories and art, how does one transform a documentary of everyday life into something called theatre?

A joint production by Volkstheater Wien and Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) | Free Republic of Vienna