Adriana Tolka, Eni Jani and Ermira Gjata are among the country’s most famous actors and have been playing Die Präsidentinnen by Werner Schwab at the Teatri Kombetar Eksperimental Kujtim Spahivogli since May 2018 – the first time that the play has been performed in Albanian.

The guest performance with German surtitles at the Rabenhof Theater in Vienna is aimed at both the Albanian community – some 35,000 native speakers of Albanian live in the city – and the German-speaking Viennese audience.

Their world fits on a kitchen table and a portion of meat is their idea of a good life. In Die Präsidentinnen by Werner Schwab, the female presidents of the title are two women on the minimum state pension and a lavatory attendant with religious delusions, who talk in the highest possible terms about emptiness, material hardship and how unbearable their meaningless lives are. Their triumph is simply being.

Every sentence wrested from the language grants them power. And that has to be fought for, with persuasion, deviousness, and occasionally even with murder and manslaughter. Just like presidents do in the world at large.

Yet there is also the desire for something completely different. For Mariedl, the mystic of the lavatory, rummaging in impurity becomes a premonition of paradisical purity. The lowest of the low is raised to the highest heights, even if it sends her to her doom. Schwab turns the Christian ethics of suffering on its head. He condenses the sighing, moaning and false hopes of the demeaned into incredible linguistic music, into a song in praise of marred existence for three voices.

In his short life, the author Werner Schwab created world literature out of provincial fug and religious blindness. He anticipated the dissolution of social cohesion under neoliberalism at a time when Austrian society believed itself to be an island of the blessed.