Schwab was a heavy drinker who was said to have written his plays late at night while listening to loud music (particularly the band Einstürzende Neubauten, whom he was friends with).
Schwab's first play Die Präsidentinnen (sometimes translates as First Ladies[1] or Holy mothers), was produced at the Theater im Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 1990.
Between then and his death four years later he wrote sixteen plays, eight of which were produced during his lifetime, making his career one of the briefest, most spectacular and most controversial in contemporary German-language theatre.
[2] His plays are full of images of surreal violence and degradation, and are firmly grounded within a native Austrian tradition of Black comedy.
He is very difficult to translate, but amongst English-language dramatists, certain stylistic parallels might be drawn between his work and that of Steven Berkoff and Enda Walsh.