Stefanie Reinsperger is an angry person. And a playful exceptional actress. The 34-year-old Austrian has just published a book entitled “Pretty Angry”, in which she talks about her experiences at work and deals with hostilities about her appearance. Because Reinsperger is tall and blond, but not willowy. When the Austrian was awarded the “Romy” television prize in Vienna at the weekend (as the most popular series actress in the “Landkrimi” series), she vented her anger at stereotypical casts of female roles. “It’s still the case that women like me aren’t visible enough in film and television,” she said in a video message. “Write the roles, write us these stories!”
At the Berliner Ensemble, where she moved from Vienna in 2017, Reinsperger does not have this problem. The full-throttle actress is a star in the ensemble and plays big roles. Or carries an evening all alone, like now Sarah Kane’s “Phaidra’s Love”, directed by Robert Borgmann. The early work of the British dramatist of desperation from 1996 is about broken sexuality as a not particularly sophisticated metaphor for human depravity and distress, it is not necessarily Kane’s strongest text. Borgmann, a director of dark atmospheres, uses this horror-sex-comic version of the ancient material for a picture puzzle installation, for which he also designed the stage and costumes, while the musician Nazanin Noori creates the ambient noise, thumping and crackling of the Contributed live soundtrack.
Reinsperger throws himself into battle without a handbrake or safety net
Because it is not about the retelling of the plot, but about a trip to hell, Stefanie Reinsperger plays both central characters as a solo: Queen Phaedra, who is in love with her stepson with self-destructive desire, and Queen Phaedra, who is disgusted with life, with eternal joyless sex and quite rightly with herself stepson Hippolytos. Twice Reinsperger chases his way through the decisive encounter, not a dialogue but a torrential flow of memories, once in the perception of Hippolytos, once as Phaedra’s stream of consciousness: the cautious approach, the desperate desire, the humiliation of Phaedra, the self-enjoyment of Hippolytos in the sullen rejection, the listless oral sex, the whole state of being broken when bad sex numbs the inner emptiness and complete loneliness for a moment at most, but cannot heal it for a moment.
Reinsperger is terrific, throwing himself into battle without a handbrake or safety net. She shoots herself down into the existential abysses of Phaedra, whose desires are of course not about sex, but about desperation, about an incurable longing for redemption. She catapults himself into the ego-hating purgatory of the rich kid Hippolytos, who gets fatter and disgusting and pathetic in front of the TV and despises people for wanting him, but maybe just for being human. In the Hippolytos part, Reinsperger’s monologue is an angry hate song, as Phaedra she changes into a single, clairvoyant delirium of pain, the declaration of bankruptcy of the disturbed and destroyed life. So far, so intense, but also retro excess theater from harmless times. The silly stage gimmicks, a huge rubber ball with an emoji grin, three large cones, lighting effects like in the techno village disco and a leisurely trickling rain of ash make for rather harmless, meaningless images – the pleasing decoration of the brokenness demonstration.