Director Matthias Hartmann, the new director of the Burgtheater, fulfilled his promise that the beginning of his first season would sound like a "thunderbolt". Months before the opening of the season, an unprecedented marketing campaign for a state theater was underway, which included a large number of advertising posters, countless Hartman interviews, as well as a certain entertainment character of his press conferences. The result is Burg's intense media presence today, and critics who eat out of Hartman's hand. Not even the fact that the new director clearly enjoys the spotlight, and that he mercilessly promotes himself as a director - seven plays at the Burgtheater will bear his signature this season, including five old directors from Zurich and Bochum - did not cause ironic comments from the critics. The enthusiasm of the Austrian press for the new director was not dampened even by the German critics who criticized Hartmann's production. Faust, which opened the season, and whose cheerful appeal is characterized as a superficial relationship to the "heaviness" of Goethe's material.
STRATEGY AND CONCEPT: The secret of Hartman's quick conquest of Burg certainly lies not only in a good marketing strategy, but also in a skillfully calculated program concept, which contains a sufficient number of sound names and a few interesting surprises. The list of directors who will work in the Burg this season includes celebrated names of the middle generation such as Stefan Bachmann, Alvis Hermanis and René Poleš, and there are also old masters such as Andrea Brett or Luke Bondi. Another element that ensures prestige in advance on the domestic and international stage is the number of first performances, as well as the first performances in the country. Of the almost thirty premieres planned for this season, of which seven premieres started in September alone, as many as eight are first performances, and four are the first performances in Austria. Hartman is counting on commercial success, so two of the premieres will be new plays by Jasmine Reza and Sibyl Berg, which are loved by the general public. Another premiere, on the other hand, promises creative peaks: it is a play Funeral which is expected in March and will be written and directed by Thomas Vinterberg. Hiring a famous film director Celebration (the eponymous piece by Winterberg is currently in the repertoire of Atelier 212), with the idea that he should write a sequel Celebrations, and to take on directing in the theater for the first time, is undoubtedly a clever move, which reflects both Hartman's talent for media success and his thirst for the unusual.
Hartman's decision to hire even two independent theater troupes in one state repertory theater belongs to the category of unusual. artists in residence. Among them is the interesting troupe "Needcompany" from Brussels, under the artistic baton of the Dutchman Jan Lauvers, whose work is characterized by witty telling of multi-layered stories and condensed atmosphere, which evoke the aesthetics of Lepage and McBurney. For the reputation of a patron of "innovative theatrical tendencies", Hartmann can afford to take a certain risk, which is not so great after all, considering the international success of this troupe.
THEATRE IN SCHOOLS: A skillful move of the new director is the popularization of the theater among high school and student audiences. Hartmann has reopened a space in the attic of the Burgtheater, where young people have the opportunity to try out various roles and follow the unfolding of theater life in one season. During the recent student protests in Vienna, Hartmann proved to be the hero of the day: he allowed the students to go on stage on a prime day, between two acts of the play, and agitate for half an hour against economization in the field of education and against the Bologna process. The next day, the newspaper carried a photo of the students on stage, holding a banner with the Brecht quote "difficulties are not overcome by silence" written in large letters. If it is taken into account that the Austrian government ignores the demands of the students, Hartmann certainly deserves recognition, despite the fact that in his case it is difficult to distinguish between calculation and courage.
Hartmann thus continued the tradition of provocations that Burg acquired during the thirteen years of directorship of the controversial Klaus Piemann. A charming provocation, which shows that Hartman has a sense of humor, is his decision to bring Paiman back to this theater after Paiman's ten-year absence from Burg, in the double role of director and actor. Payman and his playwright Hermann Biel play themselves in Bernhard's play Klaus Piemann buys trousers and goes to lunch with me. The return of Payman, and that in the humor of Thomas Bernhard, reminds us of the artistic symbiosis of these two artists, which once caused political scandals in Austria.
REPERTORY: Let's take a look at two performances of different sensibilities, which are representative of the mixed character of Hartmann's repertoire. There is a new play by the favorite of German critics, Roland Schimmelpfenig (known to our audience as a member of the jury of the last BITEF), who tried his hand at the role of director of his own play for the first time. Schimmelpfennig's piece Golden dragon is a clever text that mixes humor, quick and simple dialogues, and some social criticism. We follow two intertwined stories connected by the same building and the Chinese restaurant on its ground floor. Episodes from the lives of the residents of the building are arranged: a Chinese man suffers from toothache, but is not allowed to see the dentist because he works illegally in the restaurant; the flight attendant has an existential crisis; the grocer's owner works day and night; a man is left by his girlfriend for another. This story flow is related to the fable of the cricket and the ant. Gradually, it is revealed that the "cricket" is actually a Chinese woman who is staying in the country illegally, and lives with the owner of the grocery store, who sells her as a prostitute in exchange for an apartment and food. Slave owners from the West exploit people in search of a better life - that's roughly the point of this piece, which lives on one witty quip.
A performance Golden dragon, however, was directed effectively and wittily, so it could be said that the director Schimmelpfenig outplayed the writer Schimmelpfenig many times over. As a contrast to the realistic character of the play, the director breaks the stage illusion: the actors stay on stage even when they are not acting, change clothes and jump into new roles, add props to each other; women play male roles, men play female roles, young people play old people, and old people play young people. Although we end up with a dead Chinese man and a beaten Chinese woman, the whole thing is not too heavy to spoil the citizens' dinner after leaving the Burgtheater. Leading theaters are happy to stage such plays, because with them they do not risk anything, and they gain the reputation of theaters that are at the center of contemporary events.
The second premiere is characterized by classic aesthetics and deeply disturbing content. It's about drama Avgust: Osage County (August: Osage County) by the American writer Tracy Letts. This Pulitzer Prize winner is the discovery of the season in the German-speaking world. All accounts of Letts' biography highlight the strangeness of the artist's path: from a troubled past of drug and alcohol abuse, to a self-taught actor and writer with a penchant for drama Avgust: Osage County made a big Broadway hit. An astonishing fact, already because the play lasts more than three hours (at the Academy Theater, Burg's house, it lasts a total of four and a half hours with two intermissions), and it gives a devastating picture of contemporary American society, inspired by the family dramas of Eugene O'Neill and Edward Albee .
The drama is dominated by the tyrant mother, who is addicted to pills, and the absent alcoholic father, who during the drama is found to have committed suicide; there are also three daughters, husbands, an aunt - "the world" in miniature. It is about the drama of great psychological conflicts, suppression of the truth and discovery of lies. The range of psychological problems and pathologies is wide: alcoholism, drug addiction, incest, adultery, seduction of a minor. It is a remarkable psychological portrait of the mother, the type of strong woman in whose shadow all others fail, including herself. The only normal and constructive person in the whole play is the Bedinerka, otherwise an Indian woman. This is an important detail considering that the story takes place in Oklahoma (where Tracy Letts comes from), today an ultra-conservative state that was once "gifted" to the Indians, only to be taken from them after the discovery of oil in Oklahoma. The most humane person is thus a descendant of the losers, not the winners, of American society. Alvis Hermanis expertly directed; he approached the feelings of the characters seriously, avoiding the permanent drama on the stage to slip into the tone of a soap opera.
The overall balance of the new Burg is positive, so we can eagerly await the outcome of Hartmann's new surprises.
