Festival premiere

Thomas Bernhard has a hard time in Reichenau

Therese Affolter, Julia Stemberger, Stefan Jürgens, Martin Schwab

(Bild: Lalo Jodlbauer)

Bernhard's "The Ignorant and the Madman" is a little slow in Reichenau. The main actors Julia Stemberger, Stefan Jürgens and Martin Schwab are challenged. Still worth seeing despite the hardships!

The novels all still glow and sparkle, from the early disturbances to the cunning rebelliousness of the late years. But Bernhard's plays fade under the hands of directors and actors today. And yet, following the ban on performances in 1989, the year of his death, they are once again being performed widely in Austria. Since then, however, the sensational nonsense of that time has proved to be elaborate and irrelevant. The provocative potential can hardly be understood anymore. What remains are high quality conversational comedies, with a mostly overlong first act, an ingenious second act and a third act that falls away.

The early work "The Ignorant and the Madman" does not have the latter. But the first proves to be tough at the reunion in Reichenau: the drunkard father waits in the opera dressing room for his daughter, a famous coloratura soprano, who is late as usual. Her groupie, an eccentric doctor, passes the time with insights into the art of opening corpses. Bruno Ganz played this quasi-soloist at the premiere in 1972, and Joachim Meyerhoff was later seen at the Burgtheater. In Reichenau, Stefan Jürgens, a present, articulate protagonist, was called upon. But not any more, whereas Ganz understood language itself as a musical instrument and Meyerhoff is a high-performance virtuoso. This is the only way to get to grips with Bernhard's dialogs, which are crafted according to musical laws: It is not enough to get them over and done with quickly and familiarly. You have to take the risk of consistently torturing the audience. With luck, this will produce the heavenly lengths familiar from the music.

Of course, the performance also has great advantages. As Claus Peymann's intellectual partner, the director Hermann Beil was jointly responsible for the historical Bernhard triumphs. He has mastered the original sound, which Martin Schwab as the father, Julia Stemberger as the daughter and Therese Affolter as the almost mute dresser learned from the master himself. Thus, the second act (with Dirk Nocker as the waiter) still manages to unfold enough atmosphere and demons. It takes place in the "Drei Husaren", once Vienna's finest culinary address, now the sad side wing of a large confectionery. If only that isn't an omen.