Sexless masturbation
“Reigen” at the Salzburg Festival
What: AFP
Little is left in Salzburg of the lust that Arthur Schnitzler’s notorious “Reigen” tells about. A contemporary new version denies the desire for language and eroticism for hours. Politically correct but off topic.
Dhe most famous dash in theater history. This is the, well: unspoken, unstaged intercourse that in Arthur Schnitzler’s legendary and infamous “Reigen” tells of the mechanics of pleasure, which shimmy through all social classes. And which closes in ten dialogue scenes about whore and soldier, soldier and … up to the count, who ends up with the whore of the beginning, as an eternal circle of desire.
An original construct, an immensely innovative approach to the game in the shadow of Freud. Completed in 1897, premiered in Hungarian in 1912 in Budapest without authorization, became a huge scandal in Berlin in 1920, although Alfred Kerr found: “Schnitzler is more whimsical than faunig.” Banned by the author in 1922, posthumously until 1982 January 1st at 00:25 the first premiere took place, gasping and moaning with pleasure. Since then (and before that) the material has been transformed into radio plays, films, ballets, musicals and new, updated theatrical versions, from Werner Schwab’s sex-shop-like “Reizenden Reigen” to the gay singspiel “La Ronde”.
And now the Salzburg Festival. “Round dance. After Arthur Schnitzler” is announced here by the drama department. Of course, this recent “new version of the ten dialogues” by ten contemporary writers only caused a scandal in the run-up to the media coverage of the Latvian-born American director Yana Ross and the Swiss author Lukas Bärfuss, who was also involved, about the “toxic” festival sponsorship of the mining company Solway who have since separated. The rest of this co-production with the Zurich Schauspielhaus on the dank, steamy Salzburg scene is mostly idle chatter.
And as is so common today with largely collectively curated art efforts: no one is responsible, no one cares about the other, everyone just does their own thing and goes through with it. Because everyone had to write in isolation, knew nothing about any character connections. Even the director obscures, waters down and obfuscates messages because she further dissolves the inherently strict form. In the end there is nothing left of Schnitzler, and nothing is really overwritten, even though today, with new dating formats, refusal to have sex or the fashionable fluidity of the genders, there really would be enough material for literary-dramatic processing of horniness.
Lena Schwarz (l) and Yodit Tarikwa in Schnitzler’s “Reigen”
Source: dpa
Ross chose a restaurant with an upscale, modernist design as a common and symbolically charged place for rather neutral encounters, which Martón Ágh placed in the form of dozens of tables on three carpeted steps in front of a slanted mirror pointing into infinity. Piano music bubbles up subtly, later there is Ravel’s doomsday “La Valse” or cuddly pop. In between, you can even dance like a ballet.
Here, between bustling waiters, the seven live performers meet in ever new constellations, and three Russians, who can only be seen via Skype on half-height screen panels, come into the picture. And if it’s sagging again, crockery, glasses and cutlery can be thrown down, you can stride decoratively over chairs and tables or – the famous Sibylle Canonica has to do it with her usual hectic frayedness – simply clear everything away radically.
Nobody wants to climb anymore
At the beginning, Austria’s radical language artist Lydia Haider still approaches the Schnitzler original with the crudest Mutzenbacher dialect, turned by the Canonica as a whore to the highest level of linguistic art (even if “Pfeifsau” in the English subtitles is leveled to “Cockwhistler”), seems an original overwrite is still possible. But that gets tattered at the latest when five people at the table share the dialogue and watch unimpressed as the soldier (Ur Peter Halter) shoves his Glock pistol up his butt. Masturbation sexless. Just like the evening.
Because what follows is, over long stretches of the almost two and a half non-stop hours of play, a refusal to speak and a negation of the relationship war. The scenes unwind without obligation, sometimes more (child murder fantasies by Sharon Dodua Otoo or the young couple on their first wedding anniversary by Leif Randt), sometimes less original (the raped nanny who also plays the judge here by Leïla Slimani or the lesbians in SS uniform by Hengameh Yaghoobifarah). The original is doubled by two actresses, Maria Stuart and Elisabeth, even a Herr Graf comes along, the acting is immaculate. And politically correct, Corona and the Ukraine war (extremely dense, but not very effective in Mikhail Durnenkov’s scene) are also included.
The not at all amorous, even sexual merry-go-round keeps going around, but no one wants to get on anymore. The end? Bucklessness, total, presumably duplicated from another Bärfuss opus about natural resources, the Global South and – again – Glock. Topic missed. Nevertheless, friendly short applause.