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From role reversal to role reversal to exhaustion: the ensemble in “Heldenplatz”
Photo:
Matthias Horn / Burgtheater Vienna
A few boos and whistles for Frank Castorf, the director. But also: seven minutes of sustained applause, not only, but especially for the ensemble. So after a total of more than five hours, the premiere of Thomas Bernhard's “Heldenplatz” at Vienna's Burgtheater ends shortly before midnight on Saturday evening.
This time, Heinz-Christian Strache was not among the booers. The ex-vice chancellor of the right-wing populist FPÖ, who was overthrown over the Ibiza video, was partying the night before. It was probably late at the Academic Ball for the Freedom Party and Fraternities in the Hofburg.
In 1988, however, at the premiere of the scandalous Bernhard play, the then 19-year-old neo-Nazi sympathizer Strache was there. He protested for minutes from the upper echelons among his comrades. Against the alleged polluter Bernhard, who immortalized sentences in "Heldenplatz" like: Austria is a synonym for "six and a half million idiots and rabid people."
Massive hostility
Burgtheater director Claus Peymann was also booed by Strache and his followers. The German director had ordered the piece from Bernhard and then brought it to the stage - in the so-called "year of reflection", 50 years after Adolf Hitler's entry into Vienna's Heldenplatz, which was cheered by hundreds of thousands.
During his time as boss at the "Burg" there was still massive hostility (Jörg Haider: "Out of Vienna with the villain"), Peymann is now back on Saturday evening: During the break of the Castorf premiere, the 86-year-old is with the Back to the Ringstrasse in the foyer, all around you can chat with wine and snacks. The great theater maker doesn't let on what he thinks about the production by Castorf, who is 14 years his junior.
“Mindless and cultureless sewer”
Peymann was a friend and supporter of Thomas Bernhard. Hand in hand with the author, who was already seriously ill at the time, and the ensemble, he received a 32-minute standing ovation after the premiere, which drowned out the protests of Strache and company. The evening of the premiere marked the climax of a culture war in Austria. Two years earlier, Kurt Waldheim, who was heavily burdened by his Nazi and Wehrmacht past, had been elected Federal President.
In his last piece, Bernhard countered the interpretation that had been preached for decades that Austria was the "first victim" of Hitler's aggressive policy and therefore innocent, polemically pointed psychograms of the average resident of his country. “Hate of Jews is the purest, absolutely unadulterated nature of the Austrian,” it says, or: Post-war Austria has turned into a “spiritless and cultureless sewer” in which everything has “burned out, rotted and degenerated.”
Burgtheater in flames
Despite the strictest secrecy imposed, in the run-up to the premiere, the most vitriolic invectives had gradually leaked out - without any context, without any indication that the devastating diagnoses did not come directly from the author, but from characters in the play; by Jewish descendants of Professor Josef Schuster, who returned to post-war Vienna and died by suicide.
From the Federal President down through former Chancellor Bruno Kreisky to Jörg Haider, the community of thought ranged from outraged. The "Kronen Zeitung" published an advertisement in which the Burgtheater was shown in flames, under the line "Nothing is too hot for us." On the evening of the premiere, demonstrators emptied bags full of manure in front of the Olympus of German-language performing arts.
None of this is happening this Saturday evening in Vienna. Neither protesters with banners nor their crappy “horse apples,” as the mocker André Heller called it at the time, make it difficult for the premiere audience to arrive. Shortly before half past six, Alexander Schallenberg, Foreign Minister of the Republic of Austria, makes himself comfortable in row 5, on the far right. Later, he wouldn't bat an eyelid when it was announced from the stage that all politicians in this country were "rubbish" and that "the Federal Chancellor" unfortunately could hardly speak a straight sentence.
The current incumbent is Karl Nehammer, at that time it was Franz Vranitzky. The latter had accused Thomas Bernhard in 1985 of "writing his own uptightness about this country by absorbing tax shillings."
Worship tending towards fanaticism
The author retaliated in his will by banning the performance of his plays throughout Austria. In addition, he posthumously forbids “any interference from this Austrian state” – political prominence should stay away from him.
But that's over. The former nest polluter Bernhard has long been considered canonized.
As early as 1993, the Austrian State Prize winner Ilse Aichinger noted in her essay “The Threatening Crowd of Followers” that the veneration of Bernhard tended toward “blind fanaticism.” According to Aichinger, mass enthusiasm like that of Hitler's arrival at Heldenplatz in 1938 could also be masked as an "absolute counterpart." As a sign that the author's work is misunderstood.
Castorf seems to agree with Aichinger's view. He says: "This skepticism is appropriate for anything that receives too much applause, where too many people shout the same thing."
How does he now approach the late oeuvre of Bernhard in Vienna, this director Castorf, who is not primarily famous for his faithfulness to his work? Since his days at the Volksbühne, fans have celebrated him, a native of East Berlin, as a universally well-read, borderline-brilliant smasher and synthesizer.
Castorf reported that he had been warned in advance to be “friendly” to Bernhard. He complies with the request on stage in that he uses the piece on which “Heldenplatz” is based in what he calls the “big quarry”. But his production extends the view far beyond the historic Heldenplatz, beyond Vienna and the question of Austrian guilt.
In a tried and tested manner, the director incorporates elements into his production that are intended to illustrate the core message. In this case: that future catastrophes can also be hidden in the self-righteousness of late-born people. Castorf says: "It's always easier to take the right attitude when history has already happened."
The Burgtheater audience sees, in sometimes frantic scenes and impressive backdrops, how the future US President John F. Kennedy traveled through Europe as a student in the late 1930s, just like the already successful US writer Thomas Wolfe. And how both, drawn in their own way by facets of German style and culture, are unable to anticipate the impending disaster.
Exposed private parts in front of row one
Castorf's consistently magnificent ensemble, led by an infinitely versatile Birgit Minichmayr and the 84-year-old Branko Samarovski, expends itself, reversing roles after reversing roles, to the point of exhaustion. At one point Minichmayr, dressed as a full-body mummy wrapped in bandages, moans: "What these directors are doing to the actors."
And the audience too, I might add. Because Castorf always demands taste tests from the predominantly soigned Burgtheater visitors. Minutes before the break, for example, he lets one of his actresses do her big business in a metal bucket under the table while she talks about Nazi Austria in 1988 and the family sits together at the table above. Hours later, two male ensemble members present their exposed private parts to the premiere audience in the front row.
There you take it in silence and with composure, that evening in the Burgtheater. On the other hand, recurring attacks of spite against the nearby, traditional Theater in der Josefstadt ("They've been making an operetta out of everything there for 200 years") provoke slight laughter.
Claus Peymann, the original “Heldenplatz” creator, will have heard the inside joke from his seat in the Burgtheater and probably even appreciated it. He is currently staging Beckett's “Waiting for Godot” at the Theater in der Josefstadt.