Now day-to-day life on stage was finally allowed to start again in Vienna - under the strictest security precautions that had already been proven in the previous year, but now even more closely monitored and with FFP2 masks in front of the nose and mouth for the audience during the entire stay in the respective theater building. The large main building of the Burgtheater complex on Vienna's Ringstrasse will be renovated somewhat by September, i.e. for the coming 2021/2022 season, so the first scheduled premieres will take place in the smaller venues. For example in the academy theater. Mateja Koležnik has previously staged Maria Lazar's “The Executioner” in a surprisingly convincing tripling of this one-act play.
For Strindberg's “Fräulein Julie”, however, she falls back into her now well-known scam: Most of the plot of the respective play takes place, barely visible to the audience and, if, as on this premiere evening, the microphones do not seem quite correctly adjusted sometimes difficult to hear, somewhere in the background.
This time, Koležnik even intensified this idea by having Raimund Orfeo Voigt design a set, the peep box, from which Maresi Riegner as Miss Julie, Sarah Viktoria Frick as cook-housemaid Kristin and Itay Tiran as servant Jean never step out before the final applause , on the empty stage except for the lighting fixtures.
Let's call it discuss
So we look into a bathroom (with a bathtub and hot water boiler, probably around the 1980s, on the left, sink and toilet on the right), and sometimes, when the bathroom door, which is glassed in yellow, we catch a glimpse into the corridor behind it, which may presumably lead to the salon on the left, the kitchen or the staff rooms on the right. We recognize that this bathroom houses the so-called fourth wall, which is completely clad with anti-reflective glass, when Kristin also cleans that pane of glass from the inside. Occasionally Kristin overhears when her possible fiancé Jean lets herself be seduced by Julie into sexual acts, or Julie cuts her wrists in the bathtub while the other two outside the door, well, let's call it: discussing. About God, the world and their relationship.Maresi Riegner then (after the attempted suicide; whether Julie actually dies in the end, this staging leaves open) felt for the last third of the evening her role of the young woman who can only be described as manic-depressive (nowadays more correctly: bipolar-disordered) play completely naked. A deeper meaning is revealed from this just as little as from the peep-box perspective.
The next premiere, this time in the casino on Schwarzenbergplatz, is a lot happier. "Der Fiskus" by Felicia Zeller, nominated in 2020 for the Mülheim Dramatists' Prize (which was unfortunately postponed due to the corona pandemic), will be premiered in Austria under the direction of Anita Vulesica. The tax office, in whose everyday life Zeller wants to offer an insight, was even very carefully removed a little. The director and dramaturgy (Rita Czapka, Tobias Herzberg) didn't have much to change, because, as is well known, the official principle in the entire German-speaking area is: "From the cradle to the grave - forms, forms!"