A piece like “Tales from the Vienna Woods” should Vienna Burgtheater actually able to play on one leg and blindfolded. In fact, Austria’s national stage is having a surprisingly difficult time with Ödön von Horváth’s masterpiece. Eleven years ago, on the penultimate attempt, the director Stefan Bachmann simply couldn’t find the right sound for the piece. The new version that Johan Simons has now staged is interesting, but only partially worked.
“Stories from the Vienna Woods” (1931) is about how young Marianne’s wings are brutally clipped by a bigoted, petty-bourgeois society. The bad joke of this artificial “folk piece” consists on the one hand in the fact that the characters speak above their level; Sayings, for example, are generally applied in such a way that they do not fit at the moment. On the other hand, Horváth uses Vienna cliché images such as a picturesque row of shops or a wine tavern as a soft background against which the characters’ bestialities come to the fore all the more sharply. All of this hardly plays a role in Simons’ production. The stage (Johannes Schütz) is empty except for a giant mobile that marks the locations.
In terms of acting, the performance leaves a lot to be desired, but the central anti-couple is heavily cast: Sarah Viktoria Frick is an unusually rebellious, self-confident Marianne; Nicholas Ofczarek plays her unloved fiancé, the butcher Oskar, as a vicious, petrified ruffian. Almost always, when it gets special that evening, Frick or Ofczarek are involved.
Loiter about and shut up
In an interview, director Simons said that he was primarily interested in “the animal” in the characters and in the Horváthian language. Basically his staging is a single group choreography; the ensemble is always fully present; if it’s not your turn, you just hang around in silence in the scene (which leads to deliberately weird situations). Sometimes the picture freezes completely – the “silence” so characteristic of Horváth – then Simons stages awkward dance sequences again.
Linguistic subtleties often fall by the wayside, and a number of bad Horváth punchlines do not ignite. But they shouldn’t do that at all. The staging is aimed at “wokeness”; the N-word, body shaming, anti-Semitic remarks – all deleted. The scene in which Marianne is seen by her father as a nude dancer in a nightclub has made Simons unrecognizable: instead of erotic tableaux vivants like Horváth’s, a grotesque performance can be seen in the course of which the lightly but nevertheless clad Sarah Viktoria Frick and Maria Happel put some lotion on and feather. How funny you find that is a matter of taste; the scandal that the scene triggers in the play is in any case incomprehensible.
“You will not escape my love”, Oskar threatens his fiancée when she lets him sit. In the end, in the poisoned happy ending of the piece, she actually won’t have escaped his love. Marianne surrenders to her fate, exhausted. In the Burgtheater there are still waltz sounds, but three-four time cannot be spoken of with this couple; the dance between the two looks more like a bitter fight. It’s a shame that the whole staging isn’t as overwhelming as its massive, long-lasting final image.