Claus Peymann – Thomas Bernhard: Heldenplatz (1989)

this is a recording of Claus Peymann’s original and legendary staging of Thomas Bernhard’s most political play that broke with the austrian myth that austria
was supposedly the first victim of the nazis and caused quite an uproar among (mostly the conservative parts of the) austrian public.

more on the play and its reception:

The text of Germany and Austria’s recent history is clearly inscribed in Eve of Retirement and Heldenplatz which, unlike most of Bernhard’s other plays, contain both language and dramatic situations that are recognizably historical. Moreover, both plays were written with a particular audience in mind, and as answers to particular political situations. Both were also directed by the far-left provocateur Claus Peymann, who had directed almost all of Bernhard’s plays. The circumstances and outrageousness of these performances turned both productions into political interventions, and very histrionic scandals.
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1988 marked the hundredth anniversary of Vienna’s Burgtheater building, and it was within those centenary festivities that Bernhard’s play had been commissioned by Peymann – who had by now left Stuttgart and was beginning his directorship of the National Burgtheater. But: the officially titled “memorial year” of 1988 also commemorated other events. Heldenplatz premiered under tight police security on 4 November 1988, fifty years after the Anschluss, and fifty years almost to the day after Kristallnacht (9 November 1938) for which Vienna has a particularly despicable record.[xii] Peymann had been expected to commemorate a century of Austrian culture at the Burgtheater. The choice of a play centering on the Anschluss and on the memory of Austria’s destruction of its Jews, was not considered, by most, to be a fitting tribute.

Heldenplatz centers on a Jewish family in the Vienna of 1988. The main character, Professor Josef Schuster, a mathematician, who can no longer stand the anti-Semitism he still finds in Austria 50 years after the Anschluss – commits suicide by jumping out of his apartment window onto the historic Heldenplatz before the play begins. The metaphoric center of the play is his wife Hedwig. Hedwig, since their return to Vienna, suffers constant auditory seizures in which she – and finally the audience too – relives the cheering of the masses as they applaud Hitler’s triumphant 1938 speech on the square below their apartment. By the end of the play, the roaring repeating choruses of “Sieg Heil Sieg Heil” will lead to Hedwig’s final collapse: she will fall over dead into her bowl of soup. Through these extravagant and unheroic deaths, Bernhard performs the taboo evocation of Austria’s destruction of its Jews and of its willing acceptance of the Anschluss. With Heldenplatz, Bernhard created a memory-scandal within the deeply etched space of Austrian repression and denial.
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The enormous public outcry against Bernhard’s play preceded both its performance and its publication. The outcry was based on passages “leaked” to the press during rehearsals, passages attacking the Austrians, their government, their mendacity, their vulgarity, their hatefulness.[xv] The media dedicated weeks of daily coverage to the as-yet unseen and unread play. Waldheim called the play an insult to all Austrians. He was joined by ex-Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, among others, in calling for the play’s removal from the National Theater. Bernhard was vilified and even attacked on the street by an angry citizen. “What writers write/ is nothing compared with the reality” – one of the characters says; “yes yes they write that everything is terrible/ that everything is ruined and depraved/ that it’s all a catastrophe/ that it’s hopeless/ but all of this/ is nothing compared with the reality” (115). Bernhard claimed that he had to keep revising and “sharpening” his text during rehearsals in order, as he put it, “not to be left behind by reality”[xvi] – that is, by the uproar raging in the press, the Parliament, and on the streets. Egon Schwarz summarized it well: “One could say that the play was already being performed in the country, while it was still in rehearsal at the Burgtheater”.[xvii] And indeed, on opening day, two groups of protesters – for and against Bernhard – chanted and marched in front of the theater; and the night before, a group of rightists dumped horse-manure on the theater steps.

The play, and the production, were far more nuanced and complex – though no less fierce – than these hysterical anticipations. Bernhard’s tactics in this uncompromising play go beyond the litany of brutal verbal attacks expected by his audience. This verbal outer layer is contained within a complex and sophisticated recreation of the geographic and historic “space” within which Austria, and the audience, were defined.

Heldenplatz [Thomas Bernhard].avi

General
Container:	AVI
Runtime:	3h 15mn
Size:	2.05 GiB
Video
Codec:	XviD
Resolution:	576x432
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	1 371 kb/s
Audio
2.0ch MP3 @ 128 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/E4EA6074367FEF3/Heldenplatz__Thomas_Bernhard_.avi
https://nitro.download/view/7816128EF405BEA/Heldenplatz_(Claus_Peymann_1988).srt

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English