by Michael Billington, The Guardian, Monday 15 February 2010
Even before it opened at Vienna's Burgtheater in 1988, Thomas Bernhard's play caused ructions for its attacks on the city's antisemitism and Austria's "cunning, lying" president. A local tabloid even ran a photo montage of the Burgtheater going up in flames. But seeing the play in its belated, though welcome, British premiere [2010], what strikes me is that it is as much an absurdist comedy as a piece of toxic rhetoric.
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| Hitler speaking to the masses on Heldenplatz, 1938 |
Bernhard deals with the impact of a professor's suicide leap from his flat in Heldenplatz: the same square into which, 50 years before, Hitler's troops marched at the time of the Anschluss. In three scenes, Bernhard suggests that Vienna is still haunted by its past. First the professor's housekeeper dwells lovingly on her dead employer and his dream of escaping Vienna's ghosts to return to Oxford. After the funeral, the professor's bilious brother indulges in a tirade against the city's anti-Jewishness. Finally, the family gathers for a last meal at which the widow hears again the ecstatic cries of "Sieg Heil" that arose from Heldenplatz in 1938.
To understand the play, niftily translated by Meredith Oakes and Andrea Tierney, one has to see it in the context of its time: Kurt Waldheim, who had edited his military service out of his memoirs, was Austria's ostracised president and Vienna was divided over an anti-fascist monument. Bernhard was a misanthropic master whose plays use comedic repetition to express bitter truths. And so it is here as the professor's brother assails politics, the church, the press and the theatre. But although his bile achieves an epic absurdity, there is something chilling about his description of Austria as a stage with "six and a half million people screaming incessantly at the tops of their voices for a director".
Bernhard's vision of an Austrian descent into the abyss has happily not occurred but his play offers a potent warning about the dangers of a resurgent antisemitism. And it is staged with just the right stylised precision by Annie Castledine and Annabel Arden. The characters emerge out of a dark, brooding background, sombrely lit by Ben Payne. And even if Clive Mendus's portrait of the gloomily prophetic brother needs to grow in assurance, there is first-rate work from Barbara Marten as the icily devoted housekeeper, Jane Maud as the professor's daughter and Petra Markham as his apprehensive widow.
Some of Bernhard's local references may elude British theatregoers, but this is an important European play that pins down a particularly fearful moment in Austrian history with ferocious elan.
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| Heldenplatz today |
