Salzburg, Austria — The premiere of Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen in 1920 caused a riot in Berlin’s theaters. A year later, work was stopped by the police in Vienna. Shortly thereafter, the playwright, who was indicted for obscenity, banned further performances in Germany and Austria. The play, a romantic merry-go-round with characters drawn from all walks of life, was not performed again in German until 1982, more than half a century after Schnitzler’s death. . Instead, its fame spread through translation, including adaptations of French films by Max Ophuls and Roger Vadim.
A new play inspired by the success of Schnitzler’s scandal premiered at the Salzburg Festival last week. Of course, the Salzburg Festival is best known for its musical offerings, which include high-profile opera premieres each summer, but drama is Salzburg’s oldest tradition, with its origins in Hugo von Hoffmannsthal. ‘s production of “Jedermann”. The first festival began in his 1920s. Today, festival theater attracts a more diverse audience than exorbitantly priced opera, but Salzburg remains an excellent event, with audiences more sophisticated than Berlin and the typical Berlin theatergoer. older (and generally older) people. Hamburg.
In her Salzburg debut, Latvian-American director Jana Roth tells European writers under the age of 50 to use Reigen, a cycle of 10 dialogues before and after sexual intercourse, as a rough guide. , asked to devise a new scene. The result is her 21st century homage that bears little resemblance to the original. As an anthology of short dramatic texts by a diverse group of established and emerging authors, it is diverse and perhaps inevitably heterogeneous.
Ross strings them together in a handsome production set in a fine dining restaurant. Throughout the night, a constant stream of couples gather to share the quiet intimacy of dining as the table and its occupants are reflected in large slanted mirrors. Seven main actors dance from scene to scene to Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse,” a melody from electronic and pop music.
Starting the production with a difficult, experimental retelling of the original play’s opening scene, a rendezvous between an overzealous prostitute and a reluctant soldier, feels like a failure. A poetic rewrite by Austrian Lydia Haider mixes emphasis and vulgarity, leading to confusion. And Swiss playwright Lucas Barfus’s unsettling, surreal version of the closing scene, in which the erotic carousel circles, is equally disorienting and puzzling.
In the meantime, however, the production is on a more solid foundation, beginning with Finnish writer Sophie Oksanen’s completely modern reworking of the play’s second dialogue between a soldier and a maid.
In Oksanen’s version, a man is flirting with a food delivery man over the intercom and panics when she accepts his invitation to have dinner with him. When confronted with her, he is painfully awkward. Eventually, she discovered that her own client was a far-right internet her troll. Tabitha Johannes lends her courier her shy curiosity before lashing out at the creep who lured her into the living room. This, like much of the cast, is one of her stunning turns in Johannes belonging to her Schauspielhaus acting ensemble in Zurich, whose production will be transferred in September. (Most of the authors of Reigen are women, and female characters are generally better written and more interesting than male characters.)
Johannes also appears as a woman who accuses her boss of coercing herself into her, in a #MeToo-era twist on Schnitzler’s conversation between a young man and a maid. In this scene by Slimani, a woman takes her employer to court where she recounts in painful detail about her serial abuse of him. Elsewhere, in a scene from Berlin writer Hengame Yagubifarer, Johannes is able to show her seductive and manipulative side as the secret lover of an older female writer.
A few other episodes are awkward adaptations, including one by Hungarian author Kata Weber, as the actress, who is approaching 40, fears her career will evaporate in middle age.Lena Schwartz Despite its flamboyant, landscape-nibbing performance, the episode runs into clichés and seems off-topic.
The film’s biggest stake is a Skype conversation between a mother and son written by Russian author Mikhail Durnenkov. (The split-screen video will be projected on the stage.)
Durnenkov, who now lives in Finland, rewrote this section after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. The initial controversy, in which a friend of his family was arrested for kissing a man at a protest, works better than the subsequent revelation that his son will defect. “As long as we live here, they’re making war in our name. I won’t give them that right,” he said, struggling to convince his conservative mother. Durnenkov’s desire to make an anti-war statement is understandable, but his thoughts are poorly dramatized, and it is unclear how his scenes relate to other scenes.
A few years after the premiere of Reigen, Berlin caused a scandal at the legendary Weimar Republic Theater in 1929 with the production of Marie-Lise Freiser’s Pioneers in Ingolstadt. Set in Freiser’s home state of Bavaria, it follows the fate of Bertha, a young woman who falls in love with Cole, a callous soldier stationed in town to repair a broken bridge. Audiences were blown away by the portrayal of small-town sexism and military brutality. Bertolt he Brecht co-directed the piece for its premiere, staging the scene in which Bertha loses her virginity to Cole in an onstage hut. .
In Ivo van Hove’s new Salzburg Festival production, the scene is far more explicit than anything Brecht has done. The Belgian director articulates it as a rape-his scene, with Cole pinning a screaming and upset Bertha in shallow water that covers most of the large stage. It is one of his many acts of violence, enacted with many writhings and splashes during a relentlessly grueling production, including stoning, torture, and drowning.
Van Hove will debut at the festival in a joint production with Vienna’s Burgtheater, which will move in September, and will feature “The Pioneers of Ingolstadt” and an earlier production by Fleiser, which depicts a pregnant schoolgirl and a former classmate. A fusion of the play “Ingolstadt Purgatory”. Savior complex. A new script by Koen Tachelet seamlessly interweaves the two plays, but it’s not entirely convincing. The actors bring Freiser’s hard, cold dialogue to life with emotionally raw acting, but two and a half hours spent together is miserable company. Nor can all the violence and brutality of the staging set off a shudder of anger. Instead of rioting, the festival audience responded with polite and generous applause.
Spirit source. Directed by Yana RothThe Salzburg Festival runs until August 11th.
Ingolstadt. Directed by Ivo Van Hove. The Salzburg Festival runs until August 7th.
