Here you really do not want to live: a poorly run-down apartment building in Graz with the charm of rancid floor wax. Down below, the worms, mother and son, live a terrible fateful community: they think their lord is a "pest", a "gender punishment", and he is offside, where he is just good enough to wash dishes. He, crippled by birth on his right foot, a dabbling landscape brush with "alcoholic corporeality", calls her "rotten slut" and pees triumphantly in her potted plants.

The floor above does not look any better. The Kovacics are a dreadfully terrible family with a dehydrating father ("I'm a native German-Austrian"), who uses his underage daughters in a purely educational manner, a mother whose dainty sex appeal is the high-grade narrowness, and the pissed-off brats who constantly "fuck" pimply giggle.

Something extremely grotesque

Above all, however, sits Mrs. Grollfeuer, owner of the property: a diva of bitterness, a fury of cursing that considers the people, after all, paying the interest in her, terrible and even doubts that there is an "organic intelligence".

Werner Schwab (born in Graz in 1958, died of alcohol in 1994) has packed this desert bestiary into his play "The Annihilation of the Volks or My Liver is Pointless", thus giving us a bad habit of giving people all the freedom to forfeit their lives. only one thing fails them: the chance to flee from the mire of stupidity and bigotry. The most middle-class middle class is hell on earth.

photo gallery


6 pictures

Werner Schwab: Even dolls can be monsters

And Schwab has given them an artificial language in the babbling mouths, which juggles perfidiously with poetry and defeatism, longing and rudeness, cover-up and exposure, fascism and faeces: they wrestle with the words and deface the concepts, they fall from the dialect into a prince's lingo they do not know how to use, say "I," and mean one they do not even know. In a brief spiritual ray of light, of all things, Ms. Kovacic hits the bull's-eye, which is slightly the brown one here: "The bad language does not mean itself so seriously, and people do not care about it either."

It has always been difficult to find truly deconstructive images for this artificial, perfectly composed, unique "swabian" on stage. The young director Nikolas Habjan has now tried it in Vienna's Akademietheater (the small stage of the Burgtheater, it's his debut there) with dolls, thus avoiding the Schwabian people, who expose themselves anyway by their statements and burden themselves heavily once as caricatures of their own inadequacy.

Although the life-size figures created by Fabjan and Marianne Meinl also have something extremely grotesque, but in the grotesque exaggeration of their striking flaws, they become somehow not quite tangible beings, which naturally lacked the independent articulation, and act like a kind of mediator now between the Words and sentences and us who still follow their actions and above all their horror and disgust.

Even dolls can be monsters

Habjan is a fan of the great Australian puppeteer Neville Tranter, whose equally subversive and poignant art remains unmatched. This model can be seen in the figures that the director, who also plays along with himself, stages on stage in Vienna: worn-distorted faces, broad mouths, a stiff yet unmasking facial expressions, and their half bodies hang on their players like Siamese twin births (all of whom are top-class Burg-Sprech artists).

But while the human being Tranter enters into a dialogue with often enough fateful consequences with his doll and one no longer knows exactly who is leading whom, who thinks the thought and who has thought of whom, Habjan lets his characters act as independent characters and puts his artificial people in the service of the text of Werner Schwab.

It may be that something robs him of the sharpness and the incomplete, unheard of. What nobody should actually put in their mouth sounds a bit muffled and toned down. But even dolls can be monsters, and if Ms. Grollfeuer ever wants a "real possibility man", then she comes so close to the reality-obscuring Personage, which robs her since the Zinshaus peace. Incidentally, she is the only one who acts "only" as a human, which shows that all the others she despises and later destroys are nothing but foreign bodies to her.

Between dictatorship and loneliness

Barbara Petritsch plays this grande dame of mercilessness with extreme sarcasm and piercing wrath, with morbid aristocratic dignity. Their tenants vegetate between a high-level staircase under a plastic cheese bell (stage: Jakob Brossmann) as in a terrarium for obscure creatures, which one better not let go of the rest of humanity.

And Petritsch observes and torments her, takes their breath away, and at a safe distance squeezes them like an avenging angel. Of course, her alcohol-saturated worldview is also confused and philosophically hollow, settling somewhere between dictatorship and loneliness, reason and error, superman fantasies and subhuman gibberish, and will, one suspects, mean "the whole world tomorrow". At her birthday party, she poisoned the baggage mercilessly.

Although she still reads an almost conciliatory spring song from Herrmann's puppet lips, in the end a woman, too, has to realize that the lonely "days without whitecaps" are breaking for her now. And her life will be as pointless as her liver.

Folk destruction or my liver is meaningless. Akademietheater Wien, next performances on 2., 9. and 23.12.