Das Burgtheater 1955â2005. Die Welt-Bühne im Wandel der Zeiten by Klaus Dermutz, Klaus Bachler
2006; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/aus.2006.0017
ISSN2222-4262
Autores Resumo37* Reviews Das Burgtheater 1955-2005. Die Welt-B?hne imWandel der Zeiten. By Klaus Dermutz. With an essay by Klaus Bachler. Vienna: Deuticke. 2005. 288 pp. 21,50. isbn 3-552-06022-7. In German-speaking Europe, 'post-modern' Regietheater,whose deconstructive excesses have elsewhere been visited mainly upon opera productions, has long divided both audiences and critics of spoken theatre. It provides the greatest possible contrast with the traditionalism long associated with the Burgtheater, studies of which have characteristically tended to stress the continuity of its company and its repertoire. Klaus Dermutz's book isvery different, committed to innovative Regietheater, and with an (over-long) introduction by an incumbent director likewise committed to Regietheater. Both for Dermutz and for Klaus Bachler iconoclasm is a criterion of critical approval. Issued tomark the fiftieth anniversary of the reopening of thewar-damaged Ringstrasse building, the book presents a view from the perspective of the direction of Bachler, who succeeded Claus Peymann in 1999. A wider historical perspective is provided by the bicentenary of Schiller's death, which also fell in 2005: a chapter illustrates historical developments within the theatre by comparing productions ofDon Carlos since 1879, including that of 1905 starring the 'iconoclast' Josef Kainz. The historical range of the book goes back, then, considerably further than its title indicates. The background to the position in 1955 is sketched in three chapters corresponding to the main phases of Austrian political history since 1933, so thatwe reach 1955 only on p. 193, and only on p. 218 the decisive revolution in Burgtheater practice ushered in with the coming of Peymann. Bachler plays down the novelty of Peymann's internationalizing reforms, looking back in admiration to the work of Eugen Klingenberg, whose history of the theatre was reviewed in Austrian Studies a year ago (AS, 13, 248). But it was Peymann who succeeded in reforming working practices, breaking up the company in the process. It was also in Peymann's time, as Dermutz observes, that Shakespeare productions became avant-garde. That themerits of treating one of the timeless cornerstones of the repertoire against the grain of the text are open to question may, for example, be seen from the article 'Shakespeare's English histories at theVienna Burgtheater' byManfred Draudt, in Shakespeare's History Plays. Performance, Translation and Adaptation inBritain and Abroad, edited by Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 196-212. Dermutz attempts to set his account of developments within the theatre against the background of political history. The coverage of this perspective is patchy; curiously, it is not pursued in detail in respect of the Peymann years, neither the role of Rudolf Sch?lten in supporting him nor that of conservative critics in attacking him being probed. But one striking feature of Dermutz's approach ishis openness about theNazi period: he points out the part played by actors in supporting theAnschluss, the ethos of the period summed up inHeinz Kindermann's Burgtheater book of 1939, and the (enforced) complaisance of the company in the years 1938-44. He also brings out how the value placed on continuity after 1945 went together both with the continued prominence of figures whose political past was at best ambiguous (he quotes tellingly from AUSTRIAN STUDIES, I4, 20 6 373 the third volume of Fred Hennings's Heimat Burgtheater,published in 1974) and with an ingrained resistance to change within the company, which was criticized by a visiting star actor, Klaus Kinski, and contributed to the departure of Oskar Werner. The well-known post-war emphasis on theAustrian classics, accompanied by the Brecht boycott that was broken only in the mid-1960s, is set by Dermutz against the emergence of Regietheater.The flavour of the account can be judged from his black-and-white preference for Franz Castorfs Kr?hwinkelfreiheit of 1998 over themore traditional approach of the company's current Nestroy star, Robert Meyer; the true complexity at work in the Austrian classics ismissed. It is indicative that themost electric acting tourdeforce that I have seen in the Burgtheater in the last thirtyyears or so, Birgit Minichmayr's much-praised performance as Grillparzer's Medea, is not even mentioned, perhaps because the production, though thoroughly modern in...
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