When Arthur Schnitzler’s “Reigen” was performed in Berlin in 1920, a huge theater scandal broke out. Because in each of the ten scenes, which are always structured in the same way, a man and a woman meet and they fuck like crazy. Soldiers with young girls, clerks with bosses, squeamish poets with fans, always up and down the ladder of dependencies and social classes. Although Schnitzler only indicated the act itself with dots in the text, the audience gasped because of the “mess”. What structures the author may have denounced in the piece was lost in the scandal. Schnitzler was so uncomfortable that he imposed a performance ban on the piece, which lasted until 1982.
With Yana Ross’ new production of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Reigen” at the Salzburg Festival, there is no fear that the actual debate will go under in the scandal. There is hardly any excitement and, which will come as no surprise, almost no sex, at least no consensual, but above all debate. In terms of shock, there is nothing more to be gained from sex as such, and bringing the “round dance effect” into the present is hardly possible, even with more explicit shagging.
Yana Ross still wants the scandal – just by other means. She eliminates the sex element, but wants to keep breaking the taboo by making the structures behind sex visible and introducing new debates. The scandal is not in the sex, but in the structures in which it takes place. So that the viewer might twitch in a similar way. The taboos: rape and subsequent victim blaming, Internet stalking, homosexuality, gun ownership, classism, women whose careers depend on dumb guys. In one of the best scenes, an exhausted mother freaks out and dreams vividly of killing her three children: Regretting Motherhood.
Ten scenes, painstakingly screwed together, do not yet result in a coherent picture
Ten authors each rewrote one of the ten scenes for this “round dance”, a co-production with the Zurich theatre. Lydia Haider is there, Leïla Slimani, Sharon Dodua Otoo (who created the maternity scene), Leif Randt, Mikhail Durnenkov, Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, or Lukas Bärfuss. These have absolutely nothing to do with each other in terms of style or content, except that they each deal with a debate, tending more often from the perspective of women.
Accordingly, from a purely technical point of view, Ross has a hard time somehow connecting the scenes on stage: The place is a kind of 1970s-style restaurant, with a sloping mirror wall on the back wall of the stage, which shows the viewer everything twice. A restaurant is a place for cultivated conversation, a place for flirting and encounters. But also a facade, behind which it often looks bleak. However, the very pretty room (stage and costumes: Márton Ágh) makes no sense at all in half of the scenes, which is why Ross makes do with video recordings, with strange transitional choreographies between the scenes and with the equally inconclusive assignment to the actors, if possible to handle the table setting a lot. A lesbian woman (Sibylle Canonica) cuts a piece of flesh out of her lesbian lover (Tabita Johannes), who hasn’t been outed, others do their hair with a fork, someone keeps pouring theater champagne into plastic glasses. It rattles a lot, but it doesn’t help: the staging is a colorful collection of scenes.
A restaurant is the place of encounter here, but also of the whimsical choreography.
(Photo: Lucie Jansch)
That’s one problem. The other is the attitude behind the staging. Of course, you don’t have to be outraged that this “round dance” contains practically no more Schnitzler apart from the name that promises attention. Director Leonie Böhm, for example, has been doing associative work with classics very well and successfully for years by reducing pieces to their core message and re-staging them in a spirited, feminist way and with a great deal of humour. With her, however, the classic is always upgraded with her original look.
In Yana Ross’ “Reigen”, however, everything is conspicuous and intended exclusively for the potential debate. According to the motto: Which current topics urgently need to be on the stage? Let’s make a list! She doesn’t even give the original, which is directly subtle, the chance to stimulate those debates, even though Schnitzler’s text already contains classism, sexism, the oppression of women and social dependency.
Theater that only thinks in terms of debate is even more boring than effect theatre
That doesn’t mean that the new taboos aren’t relevant and don’t belong in the theatre. It is only questionable whether it is always the smarter way in art to erase everything that is already there and paint over it, to delete supposedly problematic things like sex scenes instead of staging them cleverly, just to be on the safe side morally to stand. But above all: theater that is conceived from the perspective of the debate is almost more boring than theater that comes from the effect. So no sex is no solution either.
There are only two scenic rays of hope when you look at them detached from the tired debates: The aforementioned scene about Regretting Motherhood, brilliantly written by Sharon Dodua Otoo, in which Lena Schwarz, as an angry mother, allows herself five-minute time-outs from her family , so as not to go completely crazy: “The reason why I have children is because abortion was not allowed to be advertised in the gynecologist’s practice.” Meeting Yodit Tarikwa as a childless career woman, a moment of genuine desperation and connection unfolds between women, each trapped in different roles.
The other moment is the grandiose scene by the Russian author Mikhail Durnenkov, who actually had already finished his text contribution, but after the start of the Russian war of aggression he completely threw it out the window and rewrote it: a simple Skype conversation between mother and son that the viewers on see video. In it, a son (Valentin Novopolskij) explains to his mother (Inga Mashkarina), both Russians, why this “special operation” in Ukraine is a war, why he will leave the country, why his gay friend can be gay. The mother cries, she sobs, he too. In this scene lies all the pain of parental love, of children’s love, as well as the unbridgeable chasms between people and not feeling understood. It’s a text that doesn’t care whether someone had consensual sex or not, that doesn’t think of its possible effect, and that Schnitzler doesn’t give a damn about. Simply because it arose out of a palpable personal urgency. That still makes the most exciting art.