Reduction is the order of the day on all levels: in Martin Zehetgruber’s sombre stage setting, the performance takes place in front of a semi-transparent, dark curtain, with the exception of the final scene. The only props remain three heavy leather club chairs on the stage ramp, which are far apart in space. The drama, which premiered in 1910, literally takes place between chairs. In this co-production with the Ruhrtriennale, where the play premiered in August, it dispenses with all turn-of-the-century Viennese charm and the appearance of convivial ease.
“Like truffle pigs, we dissected these sentences, trying to explore the incredibly wide and deep hinterland of the human soul,” explained Katharina Lorenz, who gives a cold Genia Hofreiter, alienated from herself, in advance of the APA interview. What interests Frey herself regarding “The Wide Land” is “the spider web-like, the widely ramified, the multifaceted, the musical,” as the director says. “It’s the beauty of the title that turns to blackness due to the escalations.”
The mood is correspondingly dark at the beginning, when Genia hangs powerlessly in her armchair, from which she will not get up in the first act. Gradually, the black-robed figures, who have just come from the funeral of the piano player Korsakov, appear behind the curtain and enter Hofreiter’s villa, until finally Michael Maertens returns to his emotionally frozen home as not at all jovial, but rather burnt out and disoriented light bulb manufacturer Friedrich . Like those insects that are reported regarding in the taped scientific clips between the files, the characters eat their way into the corpse of Hofreiter’s marriage until – Frey has announced it – the mere skeleton comes to light.
Only the bare entanglements remain of Schnitzler’s lustfully embellished game of love and deceit. The relationship merry-go-round turns almost mechanically, as if man were determined by fate and condemned to always seek greater happiness, when only ruin awaited. In addition to Genia, who is struggling to keep his composure, and the worn-out Friedrich, the young Erna (refreshingly coquettish: Nina Siewert) and the greenhorn Otto (Felix Kammerer) act like wriggling flies that get caught in the finely woven spider web of the Hofreiter couple.
With a wonderfully virtuous Dorothee Hartinger as Frau Wahl and a very correct Itay Tiran as Dr. Wall, the two have their inverted mirror image in front of them. The casting of the Aigner couple, who have been divorced for decades, is also particularly successful, with Bibiana Beglau playing a double role: while she hints at lesbian eroticism as actress Anna Meinhold-Aigner in an intimate scene with Genia, she lends Aigner to the hotel manager in the third – probably the strongest shortened – act has the aura of a bitter hallodri, who is also given all sorts of lines of text by the poet Rohn, who was shortened in this production. Sabine Haupt and Branko Samarovski, on the other hand, remain pale as the Natter couple. The explosive force of her presence in the Hofreiter house through Adele’s former affair with Friedrich falls a bit short in this otherwise razor-sharp production.
Nevertheless, Barbara Frey has succeeded in creating a Schnitzler evening that is refreshing in its relentless deletions, and which may radically disappoint many expectations of such an evening. Rather, the disciplined acting ensemble reflects the soullessness that Schnitzler has hidden beneath the surface of cheerful conviviality. After two and a half hours without a break, the premiere audience was very impressed.
(SERVICE – “The Wide Country” by Arthur Schnitzler, director: Barbara Frey, stage: Martin Zehetgruber, costumes: Esther Geremus, music: Josh Sneesby, with: Katharina Lorenz – Genia Hofreiter, Michael Maertens – Friedrich Hofreiter, Bibiana Beglau – Anna Meinhold-Aigner and doctor von Aigner, Felix Kammerer – Otto, her son, Dorothee Hartinger – Mrs. Wahl, Nina Siewert – Erna, her daughter, Itay Tiran – Doctor Franz Mauer, Branko Samarovski – banker Natter, Sabine Haupt – Adele, his wife , Co-production Burgtheater with the Ruhrtriennale Performances at the Academy Theater in Vienna: 4, 11, 20 September, each at 7 p.m., )