The salary increase

Venue: Chamber - In Georges Perec's play, an unnamed employee sets out to negotiate a better wage. But despite his initial determination, he works his way to his goal in countless variations: The route to the boss's office is played out in countless variations, weighing up all contingencies that could thwart the project along the company corridors. Is the department manager even in his office? Does he have time? Yes? No? What then? Is the atmosphere favourable? Does he have family concerns? Does the secretary accept the request?

In a seemingly endless start-up attempt, The Salary Increase ludicrously exercises all imaginable hurdles that prevent access to appropriate remuneration in a rigid structure of personnel and hierarchies: from one's own fear of the boss's mood to seemingly insurmountable administrative problems. And so the employee prefers to postpone his project over and over again until a better day, a happier opportunity, comes along to place his request.

The French writer Georges Perec was part of the group Oulipo (short for L'Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, in German: workshop for potential literature), which also included authors such as Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. In the 1960s, Oulipo took the approach of expanding language through playful formal constraints. Perec also set strict writing rules for his texts: With Anton Voyl's progress (1969), for example, he wrote a novel in which he did not use a word that contains the letter E.

The salary increase is a highly rhythmic piece about work and alienation, about fatigue and aging. It is a fun, absurd language game that touches on current issues in a constantly changing professional world: How much is your own work worth? Which jobs are meaningful, which superfluous, which made invisible?