Photo: Scala
VIENNA / Scala:
BURKE & HARE
A ballad about supply and demand
Black comedy by BRUNO MAX
premiere
Premiere: September 28, 2024
And jokes with the horror…
The bad thing is: it’s true. Rather, it was true in Edinburgh in 1828, where two small-time Irish crooks became mass murderers. As the protagonists of the “West Port Murders”, William Burke and William Hare went down in history books and horror ballads. Background: theft of corpses or the procurement of corpses through murder, inspired by the fact that rival institutions – the University of Edinburgh with Dr. Alexander Monro and the private anatomy institute of Dr. Robert Knox – needed more bodies than the free stamp would provide.
“A ballad about supply and demand”. Bruno Max Consequently, his new play is called “Burke & Hare”, and although there is murder and execution on stage, as his own director he has managed to never let it get out of hand in the context of a black comedy. Don’t forget – the Scala on Wiedner Hauptstrasse still has the name “Theater zum Angst” in its subtitle.
Max was inspired by the traditional facts as well as by elements of the famous film adaptation of the story in 2010. He changed a few things – for example, Charles Darwin actually studied medicine in Edinburgh, but with Monro, while he acts as Knox’s assistant in the play . But you don’t have to do any exact historical research for a black comedy, as long as what’s happening on stage is accurate. Bruno Max worked in small pieces, many short scenes that (also thanks to the revolving stage that the small house affords) flow seamlessly into each other and take place in different worlds in quick succession. There are the rival professors, there is Hare and his wife’s boarding house, there is Burke with his lover Helen, whose theater production of “Macbeth” he finances, there are the folk and street scenes that certainly convey some hectic local color (and… that hanging criminals was part of popular entertainment, that was the case everywhere back then…)
So there’s William Burke (Thomas Marchart), not quite as unscrupulous as his colleague, but quite willing to murder out of greed for money – in fact, his “method” of lying on people and suffocating them gave rise to the technical term “burking”. William Hare (a delicious one) is smarter and more unscrupulous Bernie Fact), and his wife Lucky (Stephanie-Christin Schneider) joins in with frightening cold-bloodedness. Helen McDougal, however (Lisa-Carolin German) only has her theater career on her mind and how she can get money out of Burke’s pocket. A really colorful quartet.
But Jörg Stelling as the always indignant Munro and Christopher Korkisch as Knox, always fidgeting full of bile, as rival professors bring a lot of color (and academic nagging) into play, Max Kolodej is the assistant Charles Darwin, who only becomes known as the great scientist in the epilogue many years later, Robert Notsch A mentally poor fool copied a little from Pichowetz (of blessed memory) in “Kaisermühlenblues”. A large ensemble is completed by a few more women and men who are available for all remaining roles.
The premiere audience was less frightened by human evil than entertained by the theatrical fun.
Renate Wagner
