Off Theater Vienna

The dark corners of the soul

Love, lies, lust – this is the stuff theatre plays are often made of. The same is also true – at least at first glance – of Weit.Way.Land, a cool and witty production combining Schnitzler’s Undiscovered Country and David Lynch’s Lost Highway, which can still be seen at Vienna’s Off Theater through the end of January.

The successful film/theatre mix production was staged by the bernhard ensemble, which has been running the Off Theatre since 2006 together with Märchenbühne Apfelbaum.

Life in a superficial world

One might think that the life of Friedrich Hofreiter, a light-bulb manufacturer and the main character in Schnitzler’s famous tragedy, is taken straight out of a fairytale. But this is far from true. In spite of being rich, charming and witty, Hofreiter, a man in his mid-forties, is in a deep crisis. But this is something he is not aware of at first. And given his youthful panache and high-flung plans to expand his business, the audience might be fooled as well, if it were not for the green serpent-like creature clad in a bright green bodysuit that was crawling around on the stage – an ingenious idea coming from the two directors Ernst Kurt Weigel and Grischka Voss. “What Schnitzler leaves unsaid, can be made visible in the fog in Lynch’s style,” as Voss explained in an ORF radio interview. The interlude with the video film was also inspired by Lynch. The pianist Korsakov who is driven to suicide by his ill-fated affair with Hofreiter’s wife becomes a video artist who is attracted to pornography. As in Lynch’s cult film the bohemian couple, transposed to 21st century Vienna, find strange video messages at their doorstep, which begin to shake the foundations of Hofreiter’s world. He is forced to realize that the nice fellow Korsakov has obviously killed himself because of his unrequited love for his wife Genia.




A trip to the mountains is called for as an escape from Viennese high society life. Yet even away from the city the protagonists are unable to completely escape their real world. Overcome by euphoria after having made it to the summit, Hofreiter takes up an affair with Erna, the daughter of nightmare mother Frau Wahl. Described in Schnitzler’s piece as “speaking a not entirely authentic aristocratic Viennese with a nasal twang” Frau Wahl is humorously rendered by Grischka Voss who also plays the toxic-green demon. The outfit worn by Frau Wahl thus looks something like that of a party raver who has seen better days – Schnitzler’s character could hardly have been translated better into the 21st century.

More topical than ever before

On the whole, Voss and Weigel have succeeded in giving an excellent rendition of modern wannabe high society. It’s a generation trying to find its identity between video beamers, parties and life coaching. Yet a life so close to the surface simply cannot go well in the long run, and things simply have to come to a head. Hofreiter, himself a sort of Don Juan character, cannot accept his wife having an affair and in spite of his feigned tolerance he is in reality still mired in the gender roles of the last century. In this sense, Schnitzler’s oeuvre is more topical than ever before, since it shows that double standards are not part of a bourgeois legacy of the past. And as for capitalism, Schnitzler is perhaps even more topical than he may have been even a few years ago.

To sum it up, an entertaining theatre evening of wit, a bit of mystery topped off by a tad of socio-criticism awaits the visitor.