The holy mothers are three ordinary women. Their lives are grosteque and their fantasies are lurid. This horrifically funny masterpiece signalled the meteoric rise to fame of the young Austrian, Werner Scwab (1958-1993).

Foreword by Diana Damian Martin
Werner Schwab's final work, also known as a theatre-extinction comedy, is a brutal, irreverent and bizarrely comical piece about what happens when an emerging stage production is sabotaged by outsiders. Following a dispute with the cast, the director replaces all the actors with pensioners from a nearby home for the elderly. At first compliant and polite, the 'forgotten and dispossessed' gradually start to question the director's authority, leading to a 'coup d'etat' where the theatre's cleaning lady is selected as the group's leader. Not everybody...