Category Archives: Thomas Bernhard

Hanshe and Bernhard in The Brooklyn Rail

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Thomas Bernhard.

Two items in the new issue of The Brooklyn Rail deserve your attention this morning. First, Rainer Hanshe, the author of The Acolytes from EyeCorner Press (which also published my Word Made Flesh), is interviewed about the book by Audrey Gray. Hanshe and Gray discuss the background of the book and its composition, and Hanshe offers this thought about the role of criticism both within and without the art work itself:

… art can be as pernicious an illusion as metaphysics, so one must remain ever critical, yet criticism is not the antithesis of art as all too many believe, but an inherent element of it, certainly of modern art. If those who claim to be artists simply accept their role as something which automatically validates their existence, that is too convenient an expedient, as much a myopic comfort as religion. If one isn’t critical of one’s art one isn’t living up to art’s exigent demands, which involves questioning the value of art itself. A friend said to me that every form of expression has to be respected, but that’s a hell of an erroneous point of view, one my sensei would cut to the quick.

You can read the full interview, which includes a brief precis of Hanshe’s book, here, before you order the book itself.

In the same issue of the Rail, Andrea Scrima reviews (in book form, since the play is unlikely to be produced here) Thomas Bernhard’s final work for the stage, Heldenplatz, which was published by Oberon Books last year in a translation by Meredith Oakes and Andrea Tierney. Although most, if not all, of Bernhard’s novels have been published in English translation through Vintage International, his plays have suffered from some neglect — only two hard-to-find volumes of Bernhard’s drama, Histrionics from the University of Chicago Press and The President and Eve of Retirement from PAJ Books, have been issued in the past, despite Bernhard’s status as one of Austria’s most important 20th century playwrights. Heldenplatz, staged at Vienna’s Burgtheater in 1988, one year before Bernhard’s death, was a coruscating satire of an Austria (and, by extension, the world) which Bernhard found in even more dire straits fifty years after the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany, an event which the premiere of the play was meant to recognize. Scrima quotes from the play itself:

When everything stinks of decay and everything screams out for destruction
the voice of a single person has become useless
it’s not as if nothing is said or written against this disastrous process
every day things are being said and written against it
but whatever is said and written against it is not being heard or read
the Austrians do not hear any more and do not read anymore
that’s to say they hear something about catastrophic conditions but do nothing about them
and they read about catastrophic conditions but do nothing against them
the Austrians are a people full of indifference toward their catastrophic condition.

And then Scrima adds, “Replace ‘Austrian’ with ‘American’ or any other adjective of national allegiance, and you’re left with a cogent criticism of contemporary political apathy in a world where mindless hatred wears many masks, but remains everywhere largely the same.” The full review can be found here, and the book itself ordered here (the Amazon.com page erroneously notes that this is a “German edition”). Appreciation to Rhys Tranter at A Piece of Monologue for calling it to my attention.

Interview: Adam Seelig, Director of “Ritter, Dene, Voss”

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Adam Seelig. Photo: Lauren Stryer

This coming Thursday, 23 September, Thomas Bernhard’s play Ritter, Dene, Voss receives its New York premiere at La MaMa ETC. The play’s director (and artistic director of One Little Goat, the Toronto-based company producing the play), Adam Seelig, took time out from a busy rehearsal schedule to respond to a few brief questions on the play. Tickets are available here; more information at La MaMa’s Web page for the play; and you can find a short video excerpt of both the original Vienna production and the One Little Goat production at my earlier notice on the production here.

For another interview with Seelig, see this Q&A with Jonathan Taylor.

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“Poetic theatre” is a term that’s bruited about quite a bit — what makes the plays that One Little Goat produces distinctively poetic enough to claim that OLG is North America’s “only theatre company devoted to modern and contemporary poetic theatre”?

The definition of “poetic theatre” is a work in progress. I’m defining it as the Goat goes, further specifying and broadening it with each production. Yehuda Amichai, Thomas Bernhard, Jon Fosse — the authors whose work we’ve premiered have significant roots in poetry, and consequently are able to do what most playwrights per se cannot: bring ambiguity to the stage. Conventional theatre speaks of actors making choices and of directors, well, directing, but poetic theatre  is often choosing not to choose, allowing the performers to incline away from “showing-not-telling” toward a kind of “being-in-lieu-of-showing.” Show less to present more. To be more present — that may be it. But doing the plays comes first; theory and definition follow. So, for example, when you came across my recent essay, “EMERGENSEE: GET HEAD OUT OF ASS: Charactor and Poetic Theatre,” it was in response to doing the plays first. Those ideas weren’t in mind, at least not consciously, before staging.

Why Bernhard, and how does Ritter, Dene, Voss reflect the definition of “poetic theatre”?

It helps that Bernhard’s plays are highly interpretive: no punctuation (other than line-breaks, making the text look almost stanzaic) and few stage directions.

Here’s one quick example of how Bernhard’s writing achieves the kind of clarity-through-ambiguity of poetic theatre — two lines from Ritter, Dene, Voss spoken by the younger sister to the older about their brother:

Ludwig means everything to me
that’s what you’ve always said

If the line had been, “You’ve always said that Ludwig means everything to you,” there’d be only one interpretation: younger sister accuses older sister of being consumed with brother Ludwig. But as Bernhard puts it, the first line makes it sound like younger sister is admitting to her own obsession with Ludwig. It may be a simple device (a more sophisticated version of teasing “… not” statements like “I love you …  not”), but it certainly generates multiple possibilities and opens up that space between speaker and listener: younger sister may mean the line it one way while older sister, like the audience, initially hears it differently.

Bernhard is best known to North American audiences as a novelist, but more interestingly, as a distinctly European, even Austro-centric writer. (His plays are scarcely known here at all, though he was consistently produced at the Burgtheater, with its nearly 1200 seats, for years.) What do Bernhard’s plays offer to a North American audience?

A powerfully intuitive sense for what makes actors tick (not to mention what ticks them off), resulting in brilliant, muscular writing that somehow combines the anxieties of Beckett, antics of Ionesco, and provocations of Genet.

Ritter, Dene, Voss was written with three specific performers in mind. Given what you’ve written about character/charactor, how does distributing these parts and characters to entirely different performers change the play, if it does so at all? Are they then performers acting performers, in a sense, another level of theatrical distance? How do your performers then approach these roles?

Having new actors perform these roles changes the play enormously. I’d go one step further to say that changing even one actor in the cast changes the play enormously. The play is not independent of the actors performing it; the play is the very actors performing it. That’s what I love about Bernhard’s actor-centric title. I’d be happy to rename it Perreault, Beaty, Pettle after the outstanding Toronto cast that will be performing at La MaMa! It would better reflect our production after all, because Shannon Perreault, for example, is not playing Ilse Ritter, but rather “the younger Worringer sister.” Still, both Worringer sisters in the play are actresses, so no matter what, we’re in a metatheatrical world of actors playing actors. Can they be believed, or is it all just for show … ?

Upcoming: Thomas Bernhard’s Ritter, Dene, Voss

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Thomas Bernhard

Now, this is news, and it just may break my exile from theatregoing next month: the New York premiere of a play by the acerbic, provocative Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989). Toronto’s One Little Goat Theatre Company brings its production of Bernhard’s 1986 play Ritter, Dene, Voss to LaMaMa ETC’s First Floor Theatre, opening 23 September and running through 10 October. Adam Seelig, artistic director of One Little Goat, directs the production (the 2006 Toronto opening of which constituted the English-language premiere). From the press release:

In Ritter, Dene, Voss (named for the three actors who premiered the original 1986 production in German), Thomas Bernhard explores sexual repression and sibling rivalry with characteristic tenacity and wit. The play involves two sisters — both actresses — and their attempts at reintegrating their volatile brother into their home. The brother, a tormented genius (loosely based on last century’s great, idiosyncratic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein), has just returned from a mental health institute, complicating the dynamics between the three siblings.

After premiering at the Salzburg Festival in 1986, the original production then moved to Vienna’s Burgtheater (which you can see at the upper right of this page), where it was revived every two years over the next decade.

Ritter, Dene, Voss can be found in the collection of Bernhard plays entitled Histrionics, which appears to be out-of-print. However, this is a good time to mention that several volumes of Bernhard’s other work  — as well as Heldenplatz, his final and perhaps most controversial play — are now appearing in English for the first time; Rhys Tranter has a rundown of these titles here.

For a sample, see the trailer for the One Little Goat production of Ritter, Dene, Voss here:

And, as an added treat, an excerpt from the original German-language production: