Thornton Wilders disappoints within the Burgtheater: “We got away again” | EUROtoday

Vienna, Burgtheater, A premiere. With the Ofczarek. The Reinsperger. The Peters. Great solid. Big stage. Outside essentially the most well-known theater on the earth, taxis pull up, ladies in glowing clothes get out, males with white scarves maintain the doorways open. The extra averagely dressed theater-goers come out of the tram, there are already these, the cultural research college students of their sixth semester and the assistant administrators with white tennis socks over their denims. But they’re within the minority right here. On this night, the vast majority of the theater will likely be populated by clouds of fragrance and diamond necklaces.

“We got away again” – that’s the identify of the piece and that’s the temper. The world is burning elsewhere, right here the taxi solely value a little bit extra. In the theater, particularly in Vienna’s Burgtheater, it’s of no use to behave as if it have been 5 to 12, as if disaster was simply across the nook. Nobody right here believes that. The apocalypse can solely be imagined as a farce. That’s why the satire “We Got Away Again” by the American playwright Thornton Wilder really suits the present way of thinking fairly nicely: “everything’s bad, but we’ll get through it.”

Wilder’s grotesque, created in 1942 shortly after the United States entered the warfare, humorously depicts the power of the human species to outlive within the face of all types of catastrophes. The focus is on the Antrobus household, which survives main crises on behalf of all of standard humanity. However, these crises are usually not so massive that they might transcend the scope of 1 act.

The play has three of them, and every one provides a particular problem for the relations, within the sense that the ice age, flood and warfare have been small obstacles within the treasure hunt at a baby’s party. And what’s one of the simplest ways to touch upon such duties as an grownup current? Of course with jovial humor and quotes from the Odyssey.

Even the association makes the entire thing appear a little bit tranquil. As revolutionary because the allegorical combination of comedy and disaster might have appeared, as progressive because the inserted self-reflections on the model of theater might have appeared within the early Nineteen Forties, they appear simply as staid and guileless in the present day. At least if you happen to allow them to learn from sight the way in which director and chateau director Stefan Bachmann tells his star ensemble to do.

Stefanie Reinsperger, who has now develop into a bit too seasoned and has returned to Vienna from Berlin to shake the fort festivals along with her anarchist play, seems right here because the hysterical housekeeper Lily to insult the play, the creator and his function fashions with the vacuum cleaner in her hand – she does this so emphatically that you could’t fairly imagine her alleged ambiguity. And her indignant assaults towards the director, towards “Stefan”, will also be understood as one thing apart from ironic.

This humorous factor has gone significantly incorrect, that is what you suppose after the primary half hour – after which there are two and a half extra. It went incorrect as a result of neither the intense, glittering costumes nor the try and set a revue-like tempo with musical interludes and dinosaur costumes can do something to vary the impression {that a} play is being introduced right here within the worst doable sense, that’s, torn out of its historic significance and thoughtlessly copied into a gift that’s primarily based on utterly totally different social situations and dramaturgical circumstances. Even the high-class enjoying expertise of the ensemble – which additionally consists of the splendidly courageous Branko Samarovski and the tenderly rebellious Elisabeth Augustin – can not do something about it.

Just as little because the expressive set design by Olaf Altmann, who tried to pave the way in which for his director to an abstraction open to which means with a monumental setting. Altman has relocated Wilder’s chamber play-like surroundings to the inside of an enormous airplane stomach, thus providing a intelligent switch of the Noah’s Ark environment. But the director lacks the staging creativeness that night to simply accept such a proposal – all Fellini hopes go to waste at Vienna’s Burgtheater. What stays is a narrow-gauge slapstick angle already identified from Bachmann’s Cologne directorship. The night looks like a theatrical phantasm – simply because the costumes solely glitter gold however are usually not gold, so do many of the sentences: hole and false. Not even the legendary references that Wilder invokes from Homer and the Books of Moses appear ambiguous, however merely educationally profane.

All of because of this even an actor like Nichoas Ofczarek, who’s in any other case so assured in his scenes, is contaminated by the overall innocence and is lowered to a mirrored image of an allegorical concept. And the expert Caroline Peters additionally appears most bored by the sentences she has to say as Mrs. Antrobus.

An night that you could come away from safely with out having to fret about it. “In war people hope for a better life, in peace they hope for a more comfortable life,” the play as soon as says. One might have assumed that and with that one might have tried to hit our current day within the face. Dispel the fragrance, disturb the conscience – however the sentence fades away ineffectively within the vagueness of a tolerably humorous leisure environment.

The indisputable fact that one thing might actually threaten us and that we have to get away from it – this consciousness is rarely woke up right here. The swarms of locusts and volcanic eruptions which can be talked about stay contemplative subjects of dialog. And so ultimately the manufacturing maybe actually fits this premiere viewers, which does not know the hazard. The solely factor that is still acquainted to him is the risk to his emotions: a younger couple stands outdoors the fort wall on the finish of the efficiency and kisses one another passionately goodbye. He holds her again along with his hand, she has her arm round his shoulders – a nonetheless life to the good vow: “Whatever happens”. And maybe ultimately that’s the extra applicable translation of Wilder’s theme of escaping from disaster: that we maintain on and endure one another regardless of all separation.