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PLAYING WITH PEOPLE

Andrea Breth stages "Das weite Land" by Arthur Schnitzler

When the stage director Andrea Breth takes on a play, she tries to really get to the bottom of it. One critic, describing her time at the Schauspielhaus in Bochum, said that she takes an “alienated view” of a play. Arthur Schnitzler was never alien to her. After breaking off her studies of German language and literature in Heidelberg and a period of assisting on productions in the city theatre there, Breth staged Liebelei in the 1970s in Bremen. She says about Schnitzler, “From a very early age he moved me in a way I cannot describe so precisely, not only his plays, also the stories and novels. Perhaps it was the feeling of somehow being at home. Schnitzler’s diagnostic view of people, of what is inexplicable in the psyche, interested me right from the beginning.
I didn’t want to study German, I wanted to be a psychoanalyst. And now I am something of a fatal mixture between the two.”

Rudolf Hradil, Berlin, Kurfürstendamm, 1988

Relationships are created

For the rehearsal period this means quite specifically that many questions are asked. “Not theoretically but while the actors are acting. Little by little things become clearer, biographies and attitudes are created. The Undiscovered Country is a play with a lot of characters. Even if they say nothing to one another in the play, they have a relationship with each other. This is what we discuss and I call that constant common psychoanalysis. The actors tell a story together and each of them has to know what is to be told. This ensemble is what I call my Vienna Philharmonic because I think it is absolutely wonderful when the triangle is also important and all the entries must come on time! No one thinks, “I only have a small role. Everyone says, “I am a person in this story.”
One asks oneself: what is the point actually?

“It was not easy to rehearse this play. It takes a lot of substance out of you; I was not the only one to feel this but the whole ensemble. One just manages to avoid falling into a depression. I feel the mood of the play corresponds exactly to the present. This fun and amusement society that constantly plunges into emptiness; speculations, all the business on the stock exchange. One asks oneself, what is the point actually? There is no longer anything to hold onto.
There is no faith any more, no real conviction so what do we still have? Love? Apparently not even that, or perhaps concepts that have connotations with the Third Reich such as fidelity or truthfulness, honour, friendship? Everything is put out of joint so to speak, all the things one has built up. And, like Erna says in the play, ‘we too plunge boldly into the darkness’.”

Reality instead of the stage

“The so-called Schnitzler tone that is celebrated as it were like icing over the whole thing is not a tone of voice but a question of thinking. And a question of the sub-texts. What is behind them, why does someone say a certain thing? What does he conceal, what does he really mean? Here Schnitzler is in the tradition of Chekhov, without Chekhov there would be no Schnitzler.”
Andrea Breth’s aim: “I would like the audience not to even notice that it is a staging. For me it would be ideal if the public were to think, ‘that’s exactly it!’”

Günter Verdin

The German version of this article appeared on 27 July 2002 in the Festival supplement of the Salzburger Nachrichten.

Rudolf Hradil, Lisbon, Tejo, 1992

Arthur Schnitzler
Das weite Land

Stage director Andrea Breth
Stage design Erich Wonder
Costumes Susanne Raschig
Music Elena Chernin
Lighting design Alexander Koppelmann
Dramaturgy Wolfgang Wiens

Friedrich Hofreiter Sven-Eric Bechtolf
Genia Corinna Kirchhoff
Anna Meinhold-Aigner Angela Schmid
Otto Johannes Zirner
Doktor von Aigner Gerd Böckmann
Frau Wahl Elisabeth Orth
Gustav Denis Petkovic
Erna Birgit Minichmayr
Natter Michael König
Adele Andrea Clausen
Doktor Franz Mauer Werner Wölbern
Demeter Stanzides Franz J. Csencsits
Paul Kreindl Cornelius Obonya
Albertus Rhon Franz Josef Steffens
Marie Swetlana Schönfeld
Serknitz Reinhard Firchow
Doktor Meyer Kurt Radeke
Penn Matthias Hochradl
Rosenstock Wolfgang Gasser
Eine Engländerin Heike Kretschmer
Hotelboy Peyam Bagheri

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