For those who see Austria as a country whose small c conservatism hides capital f fascism, Thomas Bernhard's play is a guilty pleasure.
Set in 1988, the year before its author died, the play rakes over Austria's Nazi past and exposes what Bernhard saw as his country's Nazi present. The premiere in Vienna did not go down well. There were protests and President Kurt Waldheim, whose own Nazi past had by then been revealed, condemned the play as an insult to the Austrian people. And so (tee hee) it is.
Bernhard's unseen hero is Professor Josef Schuster, a Jewish academic who escaped the Nazis and later returned to his country to find that antisemitism is as popular as ever. The play opens in the aftermath of his suicide. In three verbose acts his life and death are picked over by his housekeeper and family.
Co-directors Annie Castledine and Annabel Arden delay the funereal tone of their austere production with a flashback of frightened Viennese Jews wearing yellow stars. Thereafter the production settles into its difficult form which is almost as demanding on the audience as it is on the cast.
Huge slabs of dialogue are saturated by Bernhard's obsessive resentment over his nation's character. Clever pacing breaks up the speeches into digestible parts, in the first act by punctuating the housekeeper's reminiscences with the spit and polish of a maid cleaning the dead man's shoes; in the last with the serving of soup consumed by the mourners in Shuster's apartment which overlooks the Viennese square of the play's title. Fifty years previously it was here that adoring crowds greeted Hitler's announcement of the Anschluss with cheers and zeig heils.
It's stark if stamina sapping stuff. The rewards come with startling broadsides fired at the Austrian national character which give no concession to the notion that it is wrong to generalise. The Viennese are all Jew-haters declares Joseph's brother; it is as bad as it was in '38, says his daughter. Austria is a culture-less sewer that spreads its stench across Europe. It may be unfair to modern Austrians but as antisemites like to say, there is truth in many a stereotype.