The scene is sparse: In front of a gray Ytong wall and on white pebbles, there is a table with six actors from the Vienna Burgtheater. With assigned roles you read the documentary piece “Causa Kurz: The Chat Protocols”, written by Fabian Schmid, an editor of the Vienna daily newspaper The standard, assembled from original texts. In 18 minutes it sums up the affair that led to the resignation of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) on the Saturday before last. It’s about opinion polls, which are supposed to have been paid for with taxpayers’ money not only in the sense of short-haired; it’s about dirty deals with the tabloid Austriato intrigue and other intrigues.
The phone calls made by ex-finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser have also been dramatized
Readings of this kind are already a tradition in Vienna. It started in early 2011 as the weekly newspaper butterfly in the Audimax of the University of Vienna had three cabaret artists read from phone calls made by ex-finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser, which had been wiretapped in the course of a corruption affair. Among other things, a Grasser friend had the chance to ask how he should officially justify a certain fee: The sentence “Where was my performance?” has been a household word in Austria since then. The performance was not only a great laugh, it was also a journalistic coup: Since the reading officially took the name of a course, passages from which the media were not allowed to quote at the time could also be made public. Then at the end of 2018 in the Akademietheater, also in cooperation with the butterfly, the reading drama “Anything Can Happen!” Premiere, a collage compiled by the writer Doron Rabinovici from quotes from various European right-wing populists.
The current reading theater is a smaller number. The knowledge value is comparatively low. The documentation should serve to be able to get an idea of the allegations, say default– Editor-in-chief Martin Kotynek and Burgtheater director Martin Kušej introductory. But those who are only halfway interested in politics know most of the quoted WhatsApp chats by heart – and they don’t get much funnier because they are performed by actors from the castle. After this reading, the theater has to put up with the question of where its performance was.