29.10.2026

What's on your mind, Martina Clavadetscher?

Swiss playwright and novelist Martina Clavadetscher explores the intersections of technology, power and the human body in her play Frau Ada Thinks the Unheard-Of (2019). The play examines the relationship between humans and machines, as well as the political dimensions of the female body, has travelled from German-speaking stages to Mexico and has just received its Finnish premiere at Tehdas Theatre in Turku. 

In this interview with TINFO’s Kaisa Ahvonen, Clavadetscher reflects on how plays take on new meanings across cultures, the creative possibilities of translation, and the importance of international collaboration in broadening our perspectives and creating space for diverse perspectives.

 

TINFO: In your previous interview with TINFO a couple of years ago, you focused mainly on the play Frau Ada Thinks the Unheard-Of and its inspiration. This time, I’d like to talk about international collaboration, translation and what happens when a play travels between cultures. At the end of that earlier interview, you said it would be wonderful to see a finished production of the play—and that it would finally give you a reason to visit Finland. Now the time has come to see the Finnish production of the play. How are you feeling about that and what’s on your mind today?

Martina Clavadetscher: This is my first visit to Finland for theatre. I’m feeling good, I handed in a new play on Tuesday after working on it for seven months, so I’m finally beginning to relax. The timing is perfect! I’m very excited to see this production, especially after seeing the first images from the theater.

 

TINFO: In addition to the Finnish production, Frau Ada Thinks the Unheard-Of  has already travelled internationally to Mexico, and you’re also preparing for a project in China. How did those opportunities come about?

Martina Clavadetscher: In China, they are planning a staged reading as part of a festival, and I’ll travel there in November or December to take part in workshops and see the readings. They are also exploring whether the play could be produced there. It’s striking that a play written in 2019 still feels so relevant. My agent has said the same: it seems to speak directly to the present moment.

AI is difficult to put on stage because it is so intangible. Theatre, by contrast, is physical. I wanted the technology to find a body—a shell or puppet that could make the ideas visible.

TINFO: When you wrote the play, did you imagine that its themes would become so immediate?

Martina Clavadetscher: Not exactly. I took ideas that were already present and followed them through, including their worst possible consequences. The play draws on an old saga, but it also explores a recurring human impulse: we create something because we want to feel powerful, and then our creation turns back on us. Artificial intelligence became a natural way to explore that idea. I didn’t predict the rise of tech fascism, and that development does frighten me.

AI is difficult to put on stage because it is so intangible. Theatre, by contrast, is physical. I wanted the technology to find a body—a shell or puppet that could make the ideas visible. We are still trying to understand what AI means for us, what we give up in terms of privacy and security, and how dependent we have become on digital systems controlled by a small number of billionaires. There seems to be no plan B, and we are afraid both of being left behind and of becoming dependent.

 

TINFO: When you write, do you think about an international audience or hope that a play will travel abroad?

Martina Clavadetscher: To be honest, I don’t think that much about the audience while writing. I’m my first audience, and I need to believe in the work myself. But if a play deals with enduring themes, it can speak across cultural contexts. In Mexico, the production focused particularly on women’s rights, the female body and the hierarchies attached to it. The AI aspect was less central there. The Chinese collaborators, by contrast, were especially interested in AI and the possibility of machines overcoming humans. I’m curious to see how each context shapes the play.

I think of my text as the first brick in a house. The director, actors, designers, musicians and everyone else build around it; theatre is teamwork.

TINFO: How did the Finnish production come about, and how involved have you been in the process?

Martina Clavadetscher: I think my agency in Berlin contacted me because someone in Finland wanted to translate the play and find a theatre for it. I agreed, and then I didn’t hear much for a while. Projects can take years to develop, and the idea may disappear from view before suddenly returning. I’m delighted that it is finally happening, and I’m interested to hear what Finnish audiences make of it.

It isn’t unusual for me not to be closely involved in a production. I’m available if the theatre-makers have questions, but I generally let them do their work. If the playwright is always there to solve problems, the team may not have to find its own creative solutions. I think of my text as the first brick in a house. The director, actors, designers, musicians and everyone else build around it; theatre is teamwork.

Theatre, literature and museums can be a school of empathy: they allow us to enter other lives and minds. A machine cannot replace that experience.

 

TINFO: Is it easy to let go of a play once you have finished writing it?

Martina Clavadetscher: It takes time, especially with a new play. I spend weeks or months alone with the characters and their world, so letting go can be difficult. But a play like this one has had time to grow up and leave home. I feel like a proud mother watching it make its own way to Finland. The wonderful thing about theatre is that the text comes alive differently each time. Suddenly, your words are spoken by people who become characters on stage. That is still mind-blowing to me.

Theatre, literature and museums can be a school of empathy: they allow us to enter other lives and minds. A machine cannot replace that experience.

TINFO: What do you hope Finnish audiences will take away from the play?

Martina Clavadetscher: I hope they engage with its essential questions: what happens when humans create something that becomes more powerful than they are, how hierarchies work, and what role women are allowed to occupy in society and science. I’m interested in how our bodies shape what we are permitted to do, and whether we are programmed as humans, too. Ideally, everyone will take something different away and begin to see the world from another perspective. 

For me, that is what art can do. Theatre, literature and museums can be a school of empathy: they allow us to enter other lives and minds. A machine cannot replace that experience.

 

TINFO: What are the opportunities and challenges of translating plays? What might be lost, and what can emerge?

Martina Clavadetscher: Translators are among the most attentive readers a writer can have. They expose redundancies and mistakes, and sometimes they get closer to the core of a sentence or scene than I did while writing it. Translation is not a word-for-word transfer. A translator has to understand the meaning and find a way to create it in another language. In that sense, translation helps me understand my own writing better.

The translation becomes its own version. Translators have to carry cultural references across as well as words. Languages also have different structures, so a play may need to take on a shape of its own in each translation. That is especially interesting when a text moves into a language I cannot assess myself, such as Finnish or Chinese.

I write my plays in standard German rather than Swiss German, which is largely a spoken language with many dialects. I do read translations from many places, including English-language and Japanese literature, although I’m careful about reading too much in other languages while I’m writing. I work intensely with German and want to protect my relationship with the language.

 

TINFO: Do you notice when a translation is especially successful?

Martina Clavadetscher: I enjoy seeing how translators solve difficult puzzles, particularly with spoken language, slang and contemporary expressions. A good translation can preserve the feeling of the source text while sounding natural to readers in the new language. Sometimes the slightly unfamiliar quality of a text is part of its beauty. I think of writers who have begun writing in a language they learned later in life: their language can feel a little ‘off’, but that difference can also be poetic. That is part of the magic of translation.

I want to hear other stories and other voices, and to understand how people live. It broadens my view of the world and enriches me in a personal and mindful sense.

TINFO: What role has international collaboration played in your career?

Martina Clavadetscher: Perhaps ‘collaboration across languages’ is the more accurate term. I work regularly with Germany and Austria, but shared language doesn’t mean shared culture. Switzerland’s multilingualism is part of everyday life: German, French, Italian and Romansh are spoken, and our neighbours are only a short train journey away. We grow up aware of cultural differences and depend on that diversity, even if we sometimes imagine ourselves as an island. 

International connections are also important because Switzerland is a small market. If I wrote only for a Swiss audience, it would be difficult to make a living from my work, especially because language regions divide the audience further. 

But international collaboration is not only a necessity. I want to hear other stories and other voices, and to understand how people live. It broadens my view of the world and enriches me in a personal and mindful sense.