Like his protagonist Bruscon in The Histrionic, the author
Thomas Bernhard did not recognise a line separating real life and
the stage. He was known for deliberately provocative, theatrical
interviews, in which he was given to invent details about his past.
One early self-stylisation was his claim to have written a thesis
on the dramatists Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht as a student.
Although Bernhard did study theatre at the prestigious Mozarteum
conservatory in Salzburg, there is no record of any such work by
him.
The Austria that Bernhard knew as a young man had suffered a
tremendous loss of national prestige, going from an influential
world power to a largely-irrelevant backwater in the course of a
generation. In light of this, the young Bernhard's attempt to
position his work between two of the most regarded cosmopolitan
European theatre movements of the 1950s, Artaud's 'theatre of
cruelty' and Brecht's leftist political drama, becomes more
comprehensible. Bernhard's claim to an international artistic
lineage was perhaps also meant to obscure his theatre's roots in
the works of two more provincial (but no less gifted) Austrian
predecessors: Johann Nestroy and Karl Kraus. But our appreciation
of Bernhard's The Histrionicwould be much poorer without
knowledge of these and other home-grown models for his dark,
apocalyptic comedy.
Johann Nestroy (1801-1862), like Bernhard, began his career as an
opera singer. Unlike Bernhard, who had to cut his voice training
short due to his chronic lung illness, Nestroy developed into a
performer much in demand, singing more than 80 roles in six years.
As his career path took him from the provinces to Vienna, he
developed into an almost exclusively comic actor, and eventually
stopped singing in operas entirely.
He became known for idiosyncratic, "grotesque," over-the-top
performances that shattered the illusion of the theatre as an
enclosed world apart from the "real" one. He was both lauded and
harshly criticised for this acting style, which made the
artificiality of the stage impossible for audiences to
ignore.
Nestroy further troubled the distinction between authorial
personality and performed role when he began to write works for the
stage himself. His own 'farces with song' (comedies with satirical
musical numbers that characters would strike up without warning),
inveighed against social inequality, repression and censorship in
the Austro-Hungarian Empire using a biting Viennese vernacular.
Many of these plays are set in the milieu of the theatre, where
actors play actors, and in this sense his characters are also
forebears of Bruscon.
Nestroy is mostly known to English-speaking audiences through
adaptations like Hello, Dolly!and Tom Stoppard's On
the Razzle, both of which are derived, via an earlier
adaptation, from the comedy Einen Jux will er sich machen(roughly, He Wants to Play a Prank, a piece itself based
on an even earlier short English farce). This third-hand reception
of Nestroy's lighter fare however obscures the darker side of his
comedy, which contemporaries often found cynical, pessimistic or
despairing. As such, Nestroy can be seen as an author like Bernhard
(and, indeed, Bruscon) whose works walk a line between comedy and
tragedy. Karl Kraus, Thomas Bernhard, and the Austrian Nobel
Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek are all indebted to Nestroy's
legacy of dark satire.
Karl Kraus (1874-1936), the man responsible for reviving Nestroy's
reputation in the early 20th century, was also trained as a singer
and actor before launching a career as a writer. His magazine
Die Fackel (The Torch), which he founded at the young age
of 24, quickly became a Viennese institution. Kraus was almost
solely responsible for the magazine, from the editorial content to
the copyediting, which he viewed as a high moral calling. Die
Fackel mixed muckraking political journalism with cultural and
linguistic criticism, all of it formulated in an invective style
that combined erudite high German prose with low vernacular
punning. Like Bernhard and Nestroy, Kraus deployed language like a
weapon, delighting in 'finishing off' his opponents in public feuds
fought on the pages of his magazine, and, as was often necessary
when his targets struck back, in the courtroom. Bernhard's
signature verbal broadsides, which also attracted several libel
suits, would be unthinkable without Kraus.
Like Bernhard and Nestory, Kraus was also a playwright. A vocal
opponent of the First World War, he wrote an epic play called
Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind)that spans 800 pages (and, performed without cuts, around ten
evenings), featuring characters from all ranks of society, from
coffee house waiters to the aristocracy. With a feel for Austrian
dialect reminiscent of his idol Nestroy, Kraus exposed the
hypocrisy, bad faith and toxic nationalism among his countrymen by
re-contextualising quotes from journalists and politicians, turning
their own words against them.
Two recurring central characters in the play, the Optimist and the
Nörgler (grumbler or quibbler, often seen as a proxy for Kraus'
personal views) structure the action with their monologues.
Bruscon, himself a Nörgler par excellence, is clearly cut from
similar cloth. Begun in 1915, in the midst of the First World War,
and published in several editions from 1918 to 1922, The Last Days
of Mankind is less a monition of an impending apocalypse than the
post-mortem of an already-necrotic empire. Kraus himself viewed
staging the play as an impossibility, writing in the introduction
that his drama was more suited to Mars than planet Earth. It is not
hard to see Kraus' highly ambitious play recapitulated in an absurd
register in The Wheel of History, Bruscon's own work of
'total theatre'.
Kraus died in 1936, before Austria plunged into another apocalyptic
conflict, the Second World War. But once again mankind proved not
to be in its last days after all. The Histrionic, like
The Last Days of Mankind, is a belated apocalyptic vision,
a prophecy of doom after the catastrophe has already passed. This
is evident despite the humorous anachronism on display in
Bernhard's drama (best illustrated, perhaps, by Bruson's request
for chamber pots for himself and his wife). There are many elements
which clearly mark the play as a product of its creator's
times.
First, there is Bruscon's row with the local fire department. This
is a reference to events that took place in 1972 during the
Salzburger Festspiele, a prestigious theater festival, when the
German director Claus Peymann (b.1937) demanded all emergency exit
lights in the theatre be turned off to heighten the effect of the
last few minutes of Bernhard's play Der Ignorant und der
Wahnsinnige(The Ignoramus and the Madman). Peymann
proved to be every bit as intransigent as Bruscon during the
ensuing quarrel with festival management.
After his demands were rejected on the grounds of fire safety,
Peymann allowed the opening night performance, but then cancelled
the next performance without warning, appearing personally in the
theatre foyer holding a sign informing incensed ticket holders of
his grievances. Bernhard soon joined the fray by firing angry
telegrams at the festival management. After protracted
negotiations, the two parties were unable to reach an agreement and
all subsequent scheduled performances were cancelled. Though this
incident is notorious in the German-language theatre world, it was
only the first of many scandals that Bernhard and Peymann provoked
during their extensive artistic collaboration. In this sense,
Bruscon is a pastiche of both Peymann and Bernhard's outsized
public personae. Bernhard later wrote a short comic piece that
caricatures Peymann as a Bruscon-like megalomaniac director, who
wishes to stage 'all of Shakespeare' (including the sonnets) in a
single night.
Finally it is Adolf Hitler, the most infamous of all histrionic
orators to emerge from the Austrian provinces, who provides
another, more fraught model for the character of Bruscon. Bernhard
nods to this by placing the dictator's portrait on the stage of the
Black Hart, so that the theatrical tyrant Bruscon is continuously
standing near the political tyrant Hitler. This humorous detail is
not meant to make light of Nazism - Bruscon criticises the remnants
of the era in no uncertain terms, much like his creator did - it is
rather a canny acknowledgment of the trace of Nazi oratory that
still obtains to the protagonist's diatribes.
The resemblance, however slight,between Bruscon's abusive behavior
towards his family members and the legacy of political extremism in
Austria is one of many indications that Bruscon is himself
implicated in the dilettantish, provincial environment he decries
with such vitriol. This circle of invective, which always turns
back on itself to indict its creator, means that the audience is
thrown between the extremes of pathos and farce in a motion that at
first seems unceasing.
As spectators, we are continuously asked the question posed by the
title of one of Bernhard's early short stories: Is it a Comedy? Is
it a Tragedy? But as Bruscon's diatribe slowly reaches a fever
pitch, circling ever more furiously back on itself, we become
increasingly inclined to agree with the verdict Bernhard puts in
the mouth of the protagonist of that early story: "Truly a
comedy!"
Jack Davis, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Essay: Belated apocalyptic visions
Date posted: 20 Jun 2012Author: STC