Following on from last year’s great announcements, 2025 delivered great emotions! The heart of the REPUBLIC OF LOVE was the House of the Republic, where late night shows, concerts and parties took place back to back and a multitude of performers invited audiences into the garden of the legendary broadcasting house Funkhaus with the Campfire series. The debate was joined by star theorists like Eva Illouz and former Red Army Faction members alike, world stars like Laurie Anderson sat by the fireside together with sex workers, activists met revellers — and the performance collective SIGNA turned the top floor of the Funkhaus into an immersive performance installation with The Final Year.
The Free Republic was still one thing above all others in its second year: a republic of the arts! For five weeks, artists from across the world staged over 40 theatre and music productions, installations and community projects as well as ecosystems of love throughout Vienna: global, diverse, surprising and unleashed. Can love overcome political chasms? This was the question posed by Julian Hetzel in his performance Three Times Left is Right, in which an old leftie shares his life and love with an advocate of the new right. In La Gouineraie (The Lesbians’ Garden), the radical performers Rébecca Chaillon and Sandra Calderan focused on their own relationship, questioning the normativity of a world view dominated by the traditional image of wholesome families. The Second Woman was an entire 24-hour marathon of love and relationships. As actor Pia Hierzegger met 100 men, queer and non-binary people, each encounter followed its very own dynamics. In her new project Brotherhood, extreme performer Carolina Bianchi addressed male pacts and their codes inscribed with misogyny and violence, while Japanese director Satoko Ichihara playfully exposed the cuteness hype as a power construct in Kitty.
How do we bid farewell to our loved ones?
In No Yogurt for the Dead, the most recent edition of the Histoire(s) du Théâtre, Tiago Rodrigues grieved for his father in a most touching manner, while the Albanian shooting star Mario Banushi created a universe of pictures that brings together the living and the dead in his global success Goodbye, Lindita. The production The Grief of Red Granny took on Stabat Mater, possibly the most touching work in music history and blended it with African grieving rituals. In the project Centroamérica, the Mexican theatre group Lagartijas tiradas al sol literally overcame borders in order to bury someone. In this year’s pièce commune, A Voracious Shadow by the Argentinian Mariano Pensotti, which toured 15 districts of Vienna, a mountain climber meets his actor alter ego during a film project. It is the start of an equally emotional and philosophical journey through highs and lows.
Brand New Classics
The second year of the Free Republic also continued with world literature’s great (scandal) texts: They were given an entire series, the BRAND NEW CLASSICS. With Elfriede Jelinek’s Burgtheater, the simultaneously most unknown and most controversial play in Austrian theatre history finally was put on stage. In Ils nous ont oubliés, France’s theatre icon Séverine Chavrier interpreted another Austrian classic — Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Lime Works — as a couple’s equally touching and dysfunctional relationship. In her first work for theatre, White Widow, Kurdwin Ayub together with a star ensemble around Georg Friedrich and rapper addeN addressed the legend of story-teller Scheherazade, set in a future in which a Muslim queen rules Europe.
The classics series continued with an Argentinian Chekhov adaptation, Gaviota (The Seagull) with an all-female cast. Christopher Rüping combined Kleist’s Earthquake in Chile and bell hooks’ All About Love into All About Earthquakes: How does love feel after the end of the world? In Robin Hood, this year’s family play, Wu Tsang & Moved by the Motion delivered a celebration of friendship (and rebellion) on stage. Viennese favourite Julien Gosselin put on a ten-hour fest of young actors all about love, art and violence (Musée Duras). And Belgian director shooting star Lisaboa Houbrechts staged the resistance struggle of a mother and woman in wartime with Moeder Courage (Mother Courage) by Bertolt Brecht.
