Herbert Herzmann

Play and Reality in Austrian Drama: The Figure of the Magister Ludi

In Calderón de la Barca’s El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theatre of the World), the Crea- tor/God wishes to see a play performed, and he orders the World to arrange it. He distributes the roles and then watches and judges it. In short, he is a Magister Ludi. The impact of the Baroque tradition, and especially of Calderón’s paradigm, can be detected in many Austrian works for the stage, works which show not only a predilection for a mixture of the emotional and the farcical, but also a strong sense of the theatricality of life, which often leads to a blurring of the borders between play and reality. This chapter concentrates on the function of the Magister Ludi and the relationship between play and reality in Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (1633/36), Mo- zart’s Così fan tutte (1790), and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo; 1898) and Felix Mitterer’s In der Löwengrube (In the Lion’s Den; 1998).

Felix Mitterer: In der Löwengrube (1998) The Vienna Volkstheater premiered Mitterer’s In der Löwengrube on 24 Jan- uary 1998.1 The plot is based on the true story of a Jewish actor, Leo Reuss, who in 1936 fled from the Nazis in Berlin and went to Austria, where he took on the guise of a Tirolese mountain farmer who claimed to be obsessed with the desire to become an actor. He managed to be interviewed by Max Rein- hardt, who employed him in the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, and he enjoyed a remarkable success. However, he was ultimately recognized, and in 1937 emigrated to the USA, where he died in 1946. Mitterer, who did not intend to write a documentary play, used these facts very freely. He was par- ticularly daring in the way in which he mixed different forms, genres and styles. The result is a fascinating mélange of fact and fiction, play and reality, tragedy and comedy, emotional drama and farce, which is very effective on stage. Mitterer’s plot runs as follows. In the guise of a Tirolese mountain farmer named Benedikt Höllriegel, the actor Arthur Kirsch returns to the very theatre in Vienna from which he had been expelled after the Anschluss a year earlier.

1 In der Löwengrube: Ein Theaterstück und sein historischer Hintergrund (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1998). All references will be to this edition. With the exception of Così fan tutte, translations of all titles and quotations are my own. 222 Herbert Herzmann

He is given the title role in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, in which he triumphs. The Nazi press hails him as a true blood and soil ‘Naturtalent’ who can play the archetypically ‘German’ Tell, by the equally essentially ‘German’ Friedrich Schiller, in a way in which none of the ‘semitic’ actors who allegedly domi- nated the Viennese stage before 1938 could have done. Kirsch-Höllriegel plans to reveal his true identity after one of his performances. By unmasking himself he would unmask the prevailing political system. Of course, this would not only mean the end of his career as an actor, but also the end of his life. Ultimately, he does not summon up the courage to do this and settles for having gained the respect of his peers (who up to then had never recognized his talent as an actor), the admiration and love of his wife (who is not Jewish and who is the star actress of the theatre) and, of course, he succeeds in sav- ing his own life and the lives of his children. His strategy almost goes wrong when one of the Nazi actors recognizes him as an imposter, and calls the Gestapo to arrest him. Minutes before the Gestapo rush in, the real Benedikt Höllriegel (whose identity Kirsch had taken on) arrives. He had sheltered Kirsch on his farm in the Alps and taught him to speak and behave like a mountain farmer. The real Höllriegel passes the identity test (a scar on his left knee) and the Gestapo arrest the Nazi colleague for falsely denouncing ‘den größten Schauspieler deutscher Zunge’ (‘the greatest actor of the German tongue’; Löwengrube, p. 103). This slapstick ending does not detract from the serious message of the play, but rather fits in with it. Arthur Kirsch, an actor by profession, is forced to act in real life. Everybody – the audience in the theatre, his colleagues, his wife, the director of the theatre and the holders of political power – become his audience, whom he must please. Failing to please them would not only cost him his career, but also his life. Thus the whole world becomes his stage, and his life is merely a play. It is of the ut- most importance that he plays his role as well as he can. The famous Shakespearean metaphor of ‘all the world’s a stage’ is a quin- tessential Baroque figure of speech that expresses the world view of an entire epoch. It was given its definitive shape by the Spanish playwright, Calderón de la Barca in the middle of the seventeenth century. The way in which Mit- terer revives this metaphor is as striking as the mixture of tragedy, comedy and farce, of emotionally charged scenes and pure slapstick, which he em- ploys and which also can be found in Baroque theatre. It is remarkable that the theatrical language and sign-system of the Baroque proves suitable to ex- press the dilemmas of twentieth-century Austrian and German history.