This new Complicite co-production from Simon McBurney is based on the 1938 novel Ungeduld des Herzens (Beware of Pity) by Stefan Zweig, a Jewish author from Austria, living as a refugee in London on the eve of the second world war, who wrote about a doomed romance set in the Austro-Hungarian empire just before the first world war. The idea of distance therefore becomes the perfect stage metaphor.
There’s a moment about halfway through that perfectly encapsulates it: Edith de Kekesfalva (Marie Burchard), the disabled daughter of a wealthy Hungarian family, is addressing the young, decorated cavalry-officer-to-be Anton Hofmiller (Laurenz Laufenberg). She is seated on a chair that has been placed on a table, in a long corridor of light, and is mouthing the words spoken into a microphone by another actor (Eva Meckbach). Hofmiller’s thoughts are relayed to us by narrator Christoph Gawenda, who sits downstage at a desk, speaking into another microphone. Our best visual hint of Kekesfalva and Hofmiller’s location is a video projection of a room or window inside a glass museum cabinet at the rear of the large, bare stage. In short, every possible device to draw our attention to the fictional nature of this encounter has been used. And it ends up feeling infinitely more vivid than had it been staged naturalistically.
It is also clear that McBurney’s staging is a comment on the vast new humanitarian catastrophe now engulfing Europe. At the end, we are left with a photographic vision of the murderous horror of both world wars, followed by a fast-forward montage up to the present.
Hofmiller’s uniform from a collapsed empire ends up soaked in blood. The narrator tells us of his attempt to go to the Vienna State Opera to see Glück’s Orfeo – and of the sheer futility of sitting among polite, well-dressed people in a theatre while the carnage still rages outside.
• In rep at Schaubühne, Berlin, with an English-surtitled performance on 6 March. Box office: (00 49) 030 890023.
