Overview
- The new play Unter Tieren by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek premiered at the Salzburger Festspiele on Sunday, 16 August 2026 in a Nicolas Stemann production that runs about four hours without pause.
- Stemann staged the piece as a visible, text‑first ‘textumsetzung’ with a flipchart countdown, onstage direction and audience freedom to leave and return during the performance.
- Live generative AI produced projected images, audio and a Peter Thiel avatar during the show and took over the final segment to deliver and shape material without human performers.
- The premiere drew strong audience approval including standing ovations while critics praised emotional moments with slaughterhouse imagery and faulted the dense text, long running time and a distressing scene involving a real animal.
- The production, a Salzburg–Burgtheater coproduction, is scheduled to transfer to the Burgtheater in Vienna in early September 2026 and will be watched for how theatres handle machine authorship, ethics and audience comprehension.