“Burgtheater” at Vienna’s Burgtheater
Dana Rufolo in Vienna
30 May 2025
The big cultural event opening the 2025 Wiener Festwochen which runs from May 16 until June 22 is the production of a play called Burgtheater at Vienna’s Burgtheater theatre itself. I saw its second presentation, on 20 May 2025, two days after the premiere. Burgtheater is a fusion of Elfriede Jelinek’s play Burgtheater, which premiered in Bonn in 1985, with narrational, confessional, and contemporary scenes written by Milo Rau. He is also the director. The cast of famous contemporary actors kept up its accelerated slapstick and comically satirical pace without an awkward pause; their switching from past to present, Jelinek to Rau, character to supposed authentic (biographical) self with dizzying speed is a tour de force seldom seen – or even more importantly seldom demanded – in theatre today.
Photo credit: Tommy Hetzel.
This Burgtheater is produced with that famous Regietheater term “nach”, about which I have written in the past, tacked on. “Nach” means “inspired by” or “with interpretation allowed”. It is the favourite term of Germanic Regietheater directors who take a play and infuse it with their own directorial decisions and dialogue. But Rau only expands the criticism that Jelinek voices, presenting us with a farce that talks about tragedy. It is still fundamentally a play that reveals Austrians as a people who desire to portray Austria as the nation they love to hate, and themselves as the Folk who shamefully welcomed and Heil-saluted Adolf Hitler back in 1938 when the “Anschluss” occurred and he incorporated the country into the Third Reich.
The most famous play of this genre is Heldenplatz by Thomas Bernhard. Jelinek’s play is more peripheral because it is an attack on the Hörbiger family, outstanding Austrian actors whose film and stage acting careers now span three generations. Paula Wessely, who married Attila Hörbiger, was instrumental in spreading Nazi propaganda about the sanctity of the German language in the film Heimkehr (1938). Jelinek, who won the Nobel Prize as an Austrian writer determined to advance humanism, saw Wessely’s choice to keep acting during and under Nazi rule as reprehensible. Wessely viewed herself as apolitical but she did not protest when classified by Hitler as a cultural treasure of National Socialism.
The entire play as interpreted by Rau is like a Rubik’s Cube, a puzzle that is complex and self-referential and, ultimately, somewhat meaningless to anyone not steeped in Austrian mythology. But before trying to unlock its references, I should like to give a description of the play that Jelinek wrote. Although it is about the Hörbigers, the characters have other names.
There are three dramatic phases in Jelinek’s play. In the first phase, it is 1941. Käthe (Birgit Minichmayr) her husband Istvan (Caroline Peters), his brother Schorsch (Mavie Hörbiger), Resi who is an outcast sister (Annamária Láng), and two daughters, who are often pole-dancing and practising acrobatics during the production: Mitzi (Maja Kaolina Franke) and Mausi (Alla Kiperman). They are revelling in their success as good Austrian Burgtheater actors. But Schorsch reminds them that times have changed. The German Reich is now calling the tune.
Photo credit: Tommy Hetzel.
Then, in an interlude, a figure known as the Alpenkönig arrives. In this Burgtheater it is a woman, Safira Robens, who plays the role; her ritualized dancing is portrayed through a combination of film projection and stage work. As a character from the works of the Austrian playwright Ferdinand Raimund, the Alpenkönig represents the positive aspects of the Austrians. For instance, he says, “If you are looking for peace and quiet, Austria is where you should be.” But in their zeal for conforming to German values, the family ends up dismembering the Alpenkönig.
It is 1945 in the third phase of Jelinek’s Burgtheater. The Soviet army has invaded Vienna. Istvan and Käthe are handcuffed. Resi and a dwarf (Itay Tiran, whose real-life counterpart was also a Burgtheater actor) are now the dominant figures. Käthe and Istvan free themselves, and Schorsch attacks the dwarf who is trying to grab their daughter Mitzi. Käthe dramatically and half-heartedly attempts suicide. At this point, Rau introduces filmed material which turns Burgtheater into a documentary drama asking the actors how they felt about playing their roles.
The Jelinek text takes up about half of the evening performance. The rest is dialogue and action constructed from Rau’s characteristic insistence that his plays must raise political consciousness. He opens the play to beyond Austria, to the countless wars and dictators that are scattered like blackheads across young and tender efforts to make democracy sacrosanct. Nonetheless, this Burgtheater could never tour outside Austria. The composite Austrian dialect in which Jelinek wrote the play has been retained, making the dialogue somewhat difficult to understand, even for Viennese. It does, however, add brilliance to the actors’ interpretation of their roles, especially to Brigit Minichmayr who rolls the words of dialect in her mouth as if they were overly spiced and then spits them out – adding another layer of sarcasm to her portrayal of Paula Wessely, the Hörbiger actress who is so intensely criticized in Jelinek’s play. But then, everything Minichmayr does on stage is in role; clearly, she studied Wessely’s career and watched her films.
Rau adds his own idea of contemporary relevance. Intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Fanon, James Baldwin and Hannah Arendt are introduced via the Alpenkönig played by Safira Robens, a young bead-decorated actress who claims (when it is her turn to reveal her autobiographical details on stage, a Rau addition) to be from Angola and to have arrived in Europe via Portugal. As a character inserted by Rau into his Burgtheater version, she is attacked by right-wing rogues who torture her by extracting her fingernails. The extraction is filmed close-up and is sickeningly realistic. However, this scene is nothing in comparison to when she (her effigy) is dismembered underneath the table by a raging Caroline Peters who at this moment is playing a Nazi soldier (she is Istvan in the Jelinek scenes – a role meant to be the husband of the Paula Wesseley character, Attila Hörbiger). With a gleam in her eye that transcends acting and places the entire brief scene into the realm of psychodrama, she rips this woman from Angola, now the Alpenkönig, limb from limb and crushes her skull with a sledge hammer.
At this precise moment in the play, I realized (as an audience member) not without a gulp that I was being held hostage, stuck a third of the way in a row of nattering Austrian neighbours who had already complained when I had slid past them one extra time to fetch a programme. I could not protest the excessive violence onstage and escape its effect on my imagination. What are you going to do, directors, the day when enough audience members spontaneously and simultaneously protest? “I’ve seen enough violence,” we will collectively chant in Sprechgesang, “We have had enough of your Trojan Horse gifts, directors. Give us deep emotional comprehension, give us catharsis!”
I hear readers hear saying, “Audience protesting about onstage violence? Never!” Well, let me share my thoughts. We might believe that intelligence is what machines and AI have, but our human intelligence is ineluctable because it is a blending of intellectual consciousness and emotional comprehension. Even if we are artists, we need to think about people’s involuntary unconscious responses to scenes of violence and words referencing violence. They exacerbate mental centres of either pleasure or pain. Either way, they are stimulants, and the only way to suppress over-excitation is for our brains to eventually normalize violence. So, why have we fallen into the habit of exposing audience members to violence if our performative intention is to make human violence and aggression extinct?
The hours spent on making sure that the fake blood fans realistically over the costumes of Minichmayr and Peters are hours that might have been better spent on considering how scenes of violence accelerate the extinction of altruistic tendencies in audience populations.
Rau adds context over and over again to Jelinek’s play. He creates a play-within-a-play structure by having the actors identify themselves as actors playing the roles of the famous Burgtheater actors of the past. Minichmayr plays the role of Paula Wessely and Caroline Peters’ Istvan is Paula Wessely’s husband Attila Hörbiger. The day before the premiere, Wessely’s daughter Elisabeth Orth died and many local papers suggested that the Burgtheater might delay the premiere out of respect. But this did not happen; instead at the 18 May premiere, the applause at the end of the play was interrupted by a request for one minute of silence in her memory.
Just to confuse you, another Hörbiger, Mavi Hörbiger, plays the role of her grandfather Paul Hörbiger. She is the youngest member of the Hörbiger family to be engaged as a member of the Burgtheater ensemble.
Farce and tragedy, those are the terms used by one of the characters in this mélange of Jelinek and Rau. It is indeed both. It is also entertaining, esoteric, and quintessentially Austrian.
