Of course, a new handke makes for a booming house. High spirits in the Academy Theater in Vienna, especially since the drama “Zwietalk”, premiered on Thursday, just two days following the Nobel Prize winner’s 80th birthday, might even be read as a kind of self-accounting. The interpreted situation: two old men, “two special fools”, in dialogue. Or maybe also: an author who is still struggling with himself.
There was a lot of speculation regarding this beforehand, all the more so since Handke, in his own jargon of sensitivity, interwoven with wordplay and quotations from Dante to Freddy Quinn, once once more takes up themes and motifs of his writing. “Zwietalk” tells of a path that leads “in a lifelong zigzag” through the world and across the villages, of love for the grandfather who torments animals, but also of anger at his generation, who took part in the “false language”, the propaganda of the murderers, held on to whitewash their political aberrations. There is talk of a “chronic idiosyncrasy”, of desperation towards people and the longing for a home that even the theater cannot fulfill.
Becoming and passing away, the uncanny process of aging, observations of nature, the “threatening” political, which even the uncalled-for heckler Handke can’t let go of: the text keeps revolving around telling the story once more, which is always a new classification is. Of course, one might also use this naturally quite elegiac text to discuss how much Handke’s most recent pieces, along with “Zwietalk” and his “Zdenek Adamec”, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2020, actually need the stage; they seem to suffice as reading dramas.
Elderly care home as a bracket
But not with director Rieke Süsskow, for her production of “Oxytocin Baby” at the Wiener Schauspielhaus, which was awarded the Nestroy Theater Prize for best young talent in mid-November. Handing over this production to the 32-year-old has proven to be a smart move – on the one hand because it packs the events in front of a wall of shaky folding doors (stage: Mirjam Stängl) into ominous, springy choreographies. But also and above all because she doesn’t leave the talking to her grandfathers, but builds a dialogue between the generations out of it: “Honour the old age” is not suitable as a guide to action.
In Süsskow, Handke’s two indefinite speakers become five: three old people stumbling through landscapes of memory (Hans Dieter Knebel, Branko Samarovski, Martin Schwab). In addition, there are two young women (Elisa Plüss and Maresi Riegner) who repeatedly usurp the tale of grandchildren and grandfathers and thus bring the situation into the here and now. This is, as a good gag and coherent bracket, located in a nursing home for the elderly, in which the doomed are sorted out by clever music games and at the end the last, sad player is found at the buffet table. It may not be a coincidence that his persistent rebellion can also be interpreted as a pathetic rant from an old hand. With all of this, however, “Zwietalk” is above all a reflection on transience, powerful in words and images, which tells of the never-ending search for a place in the world and at the same time finally gives room to Handke’s humor: If in the horoscope “You are today “Irresistible”, one must also know: “After a certain age, the horoscopes are no longer valid,” it says.
Long, friendly cheering for the great ensemble, and also for the leading team, which makes the text lively, modern and yes: very entertaining with this spirited staging and dosed irreverence.
dialogue. By Peter Handke. Academy Theater Vienna. Staging: Rieke Süsskow. Stage: Mirjam Stängl. With: Hans Dieter Knebel, Elisa Plüss, Maresi Riegner, Branko Samarovski, Martin Schwab. Next dates: December 10, 17, 25, January 6. www.burgtheater.at
