Let’s imagine you’re sitting in a class, and suddenly Greta Thunberg is standing at the door. She wants you to join the strike. You ask yourself: would it be lazy to not go to school? Or cowardly if you do go? The 16-year-old climate activist has created a new prototype of role model and bad example. She shows how girls can make the mighty tremble, but also opens up a frontline pitting the young against the grown-ups in the battle for the future of the world.
For her first production for the Schauspielhaus, director Suna Gürler goes to the place where politics is happening today: into the classroom. She asks schoolchildren from Zurich and the surrounding area how much Greta they have in them, and wants to know if school is there to be gone on strike from. Where do we stand when we are given the choice between rebellion and cooperation, between me-against-the-world and we-are-the-world? Greta is about the courage it takes to step into the limelight and become an attacker. About the time necessary to develop a position. And about the right to follow neither the crowd nor the shit storm and to just do your own thing.
