The last bets are being placed in Vienna.
For days, the city has been feverishly awaiting a decision that, in the collective consciousness of the Viennese, apparently ranks only just behind the election of a federal chancellor.
Who will direct your Burgtheater in the future?
Still the most famous straight theater in the world.
The castle isn't just one venue among many, it's the glamorous figurehead of a business that just seems to be getting less and less attractive and secluded.
danger to the game
The theater has never been able to win a majority, but now that the schedules are becoming more and more similar and the audience is dwindling everywhere (everywhere or just in the big places? In Meiningen, for example, one hears that the house is full), now that the American identity politics is also hitting German-language theater and trying to restrict the freedom of play – Ayad Akhtar, not only the current PEN America President, but also a successful playwright, recently warned in this newspaper about an “intellectual tribalism” that could result from a focussing makes every creative fantasy suspicious of “race” and “identity” – now more than ever there is a need for a theater at the top, from which a self-confident glow emanates even in circles that have not yet been converted.
Exactly: the castle as the opposite of the bubble.
Too much morale on the game board?
Under the leadership of Martin Kušej, that was obviously not the goal in the past five years.
Of course: Corona excuses half here too.
But while the Vienna State Opera, for example, kept its audience at the bar despite the pandemic, there was recently news of a decline in spectators at the castle.
Does this just have to do with general weaning?
Or also with a game plan that made a lot of morale but offered too few brilliant game surprises overall?
In any case, the question on the betting slip is: does Kušej stay or does he have to go?
He himself has done a lot of advertising on his own behalf recently, turned to his staff with a request for support and warned on the radio against replacing it "without sense and without necessity".
Various names are traded as opponents, among which that of Barrie Kosky is the most surprising.
Thomas Ostermeier is also being discussed.
However, the Green Secretary of State for Culture would probably prefer a woman.
Two good candidates have apparently already canceled: Barbara Frey and Karin Beier.
But who actually says that "a woman" has to mean "a director"?
The Burgtheater last had its best times under its interim director Karin Bergmann, who took care of the faltering business in the background and calmly made artistic decisions without ego interests.