The Kaprun mountain railway accident remains one of the greatest catastrophes that has occurred in this country in the recent past. Nobody has been held accountable to this day: the blame was placed on the small fan heater made by the Fakir company, and that closed the case. A similar denial of liability and responsibility recently took place in the Ischgl case, which made a decisive contribution to the spread of the coronavirus in Europe in spring 2020.

Based on the tragic events of November 11, 2000, Elfriede Jelinek draws a panorama of early alpine history up to the machinery of mass tourism in her piece IN THE ALPS, which was written shortly thereafter. Sports fanaticism, nationalist homeland ideology, and the technical taming of nature are accused by voices of the 155 fatalities who fused with their plastic ski suits and burned them. Figures from different times meet at a ghostly valley station. The mountain emerges as a symbol of human megalomania to climb and conquer everything, as an appropriation of landscapes that are equipped with cable cars and gondolas.
The Swiss director Claudia Bossard worked on part of Elfriede Jelinek's Alpine trilogy, DAS WERK, precisely and with humor in January 2020 for the Kosmos Theater. She continues this work at the Volkstheater - with a contemporary implementation of IN THE ALPS in combination with the world premiere of a piece written exclusively for this production, APRÈS LES ALPES, by Fiston Mwanza Mujila. The author and playwright, who lives in Graz, looks at the colonial origins of the Austrian alpine cosmos and in a grotesque fiction examines the question of what could happen in the post-alpine age: melt glaciers and never again après-ski? Or what happens when raw materials are suddenly discovered underground in the Alps? Will these then be converted into a large mining company and the West prospecting for the Global South? From the Jelinek trial, the characters in Mujila are transferred to a global tribunal.
The two politically explosive and linguistically virtuoso pieces IN THE ALPS and APRÈS LES ALPES are presented as an unusual double evening.