Ten playwrights for a dead man’s chest – Newspaper Kommersant No. 150 (7351) of 08/18/2022

At the Salzburg Festival, a performance based on the most scandalous play of the 20th century, Arthur Schnitzler’s Round Dance, was shown. What caused these motives and why did ten authors from all over Europe need to rewrite the classics? Alexey Mokrousov.

A large and apparently expensive restaurant slowly fills up with guests. Everyone is carefully searched at the entrance, but the brave officer still manages to carry the Glock. A general conversation at a large table turns into a series of episodes – couples talk about family life and hatred for children, sum up the first day of family life together, the action takes place either in the backstage of the theater (and is accompanied by hidden harassment), or in the apartment of a sexually the courier brings the order.

The play “Round Dance” directed by Yana Ross and staged by the Drama Theater of Zurich – the Salzburg Festival has found an excellent partner for the next collaboration – is made “according to Schnitzler”. But anyone who read the original will be perplexed: there is not a single line left of the text by Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931). Dialogues are not only rewritten from beginning to end, they are simply created anew, and this is not the first experience of modern reworking of the classic. A rape trial where the victim cannot repeat for the hundredth time what happened to her, because everyone only asks and interrogates her about it, references to #MeToo and the current geopolitical situation, and even hatred of children – all this, in a glance ten playwrights of a new generation, can be somehow correlated with the “Round Dance”, but on the whole the new text does not seem to be unified, it breaks up into fragments that are practically unrelated to each other.

The decision to modernize Schnitzler may seem blasphemous. The Round Dance is an infamous play in European theatre, a sad yet brilliant example of how devastatingly wretched censorship can be. The play, the first edition of which was created back in 1897-1898, was published only in 1903 and at the same time was first played without the author’s permission in Budapest, and then staged with the blessing of Schnitzler in 1920 – in Berlin and Vienna. It was then that the trials began, perhaps the loudest in the history of the theater of modern times. Under pressure from conservatives, the authorities began to figure out whose feelings and to what extent offended the text of ten dialogues related to the sexual life of all sectors of society, from the proletariat and ordinary soldiers to bohemians and aristocracy. With Schnitzler, however, everything happens at the level of conversations, there are no indecent actions on the stage, except for kisses. But thought is a crime against “traditional values”; the talk was enough to raise reactionary circles, from religious to political, to the theatrical barricades.

The minutes of court sessions have been published today, it is difficult to read them without a smile. If you want to know in what and how the primitive consciousness manifests itself, untouched by culture and self-reflection, there is no better material to be found. It is easy to imagine how furious Schnitzler himself was at this, a professional doctor who was fond of psychoanalysis, familiar with Freud, who became a truly successful writer, famous far beyond the borders of Austria. As a result, he banned all future productions of “Khorovod” – his son lifted the taboo only in 1981, and then under pressure of circumstances, on the eve of the expiration of a half-century period for the copyright of the heirs. However, the ban did not apply to the publication of the text itself, or film adaptations, or the release of gramophone records, here Schnitzler’s fans did what they wanted.

Forty years after the first production of the post-war period, the performance was released in Salzburg. The texts were written by ten playwrights and writers from Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and other European countries. Among celebrities such as Lucas Berfus, Life Randt and Kata Weber (films based on her scripts are regularly shown in Cannes, Venice and Sundance), there is also Mikhail Durnenkov. The dialogue written by him is literally at the center of the performance, and besides, it is the only one that unfolds entirely on the video screen, and even in Russian (former and present actors of the Russian Drama Theater of Lithuania participated in the filming). The plot revolves around a Skype call by a son-journalist to his parents in Tomsk. He asks them to talk about the Prague Spring in 1968, but the conversation immediately turns to today. The wife and child went abroad and, apparently, forever, the grandmother grieves, but corrects her son – it’s not a “war”, but a “special military operation”, and in general – what have you just not picked up on this Internet of yours!

In general, a conversation that is quite common for our time, hardly, however, presented on the current Russian theater stage, and not only because Durnenkov is persona non grata there (he now lives in Finland). But the theater wants to be relevant, and in this sense, “Round Dance” is an expected performance, although it cannot be said that it turned out in everything and that the topics covered in it are capable of exciting Europe. Among other things, it is drawn out, the dialogues are slow, the texts are sometimes too lengthy – an unpleasant contrast with the harmonious, as if in one breath, made chain of dialogues of the original play. Actors—among them such first-rate performers as Lena Schwartz, Matthias Neukirch, and Sibyl Canonica—are struggling with the burime of texts as best they can, but it might be better, if not to change the name altogether, then to omit Schnitzler’s name as the author and just make him dedication.

The kaleidoscope of current problems, from the right to abortion to political scandals, appears as a brute force of plots, the transition from one to another sometimes looks like a pause between short films – darkness for a couple of seconds and then a new movie. Perhaps for Yana Ross this has its own logic, but it is not always perceived from the audience.

Ross was born in Moscow, grew up in Latvia, studied in America. Today she stages in many countries, from Hungary to Iceland, from Sweden to South Korea, she works a lot in Vilnius, her performances are shown at various festivals, including the Venice Biennale, for the last three years she has been a director of the Zurich theater, this fall her long-term contract with Berliner Ensemble. In Russia, where she worked until 2012, she was recently remembered thanks to her interview about Teodor Currentzis – Ross was rather critical of him as a political figure. On the one hand, it’s a pity that there are no reflections on the topic “artist and power” in her performance, on the other hand, it’s good that they managed with the universal.