The Unreal Housewives of Vienna vs. The Unreal Housewives of Graz is inspired by the U.S. reality TV show The Real Housewives of […], successful since 2006 in the States and across continents. Each series presents a group of friends, all upper-middle-class women, who expose their private lives on camera. For The Unreal Housewives, director Yosi Wanunu has taken random passages or individual sentences uttered by women from two of the series and montaged them to create a new, fictional script. In a formal experiment combining docusoap, TV soap and soap musical, the performers of toxic dreams and Die Rabtaldirndln compete against each other in a humorously inscrutable contest of beauty and infamy. Will there be a showdown? You bet there will be.

toxic dreams is a group founded in 1997 by producer Kornelia Kilga and writer/director Yosi Wanunu and has since realised more than 80 original productions. In work cycles spanning several years, toxic dreams devise aesthetically and formally diverse formats in collaborative processes. The current cycle, Real Fiction, deals with the meaning of narration and narrative between the poles of truth and fiction. toxic dreams feature in brut’s programme on a regular basis.

Die Rabtaldirndln are a theatre and performance collective from Graz that has devised performances and theatre productions dealing with the discrepancies between city and country life for 15 years. Their work often deals with realities of life under inhospitable conditions; issues include rural flight, dying villages, idyll clichés, or ideological differences between city and countryside. Die Rabtaldirndln’s productions are urban and highly sensitive, they often contain elements of popular culture, and they aim at hitting a nerve in both rural and urban environments. Die Rabtaldirndln feature in brut’s programme on a regular basis.