Ahen an old woman in the third row loses consciousness as she falls forward and her neighbors bend over her in concern, he stops. Look at what has happened with silent sadness – wait a moment. Silent for a few seconds before whispering, which isn’t in the lyrics but sounds like a central line from his mouth: “A doctor, maybe?”
That’s not an order, that’s a cautious question. Because nobody can really say whether a doctor can help with what is happening here, what is being painfully experienced both in the auditorium and on the stage. Aging is a “lonely path”, as Arthur Schnitzler says elsewhere, and his play “The Wide Country” is basically about nothing else: how life slowly comes to an end, how a body loses its strength, a spirit scatters.
He stands there exhausted
Michael Maertens as the lightbulb manufacturer Friedrich Hofreiter is an ideal cast. Not only at the moment when reality suddenly wants to play along on this premiere evening, does he prove how much the role of the aging erotic adventurer has become second nature to him. He stands there exhausted, he moves clumsily through the room, panting, tense, as if all his limbs were pulling at his conscience at the same time, as if he had never been the youthful lover who skilfully jumped aside at every opportunity. A hard melancholy has come over him, he does not look sentimentally at the end of his life, but with that mixture of mockery and irritation that characterizes the successful businessman even in the event of a negotiation defeat: “The world is generally poorly set up,” he grumbles , “You should be young at forty, that’s when you’d get something out of it.”
Pure desperation: Michael Maertens (left) and Itay Tiran.
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Image: Matthias Horn/Ruhrtriennale 2022
When Schnitzler began “Weisse Land” in 1902, he was planning a monologue about the absurd notion that a woman should always be faithful to her husband. But when the play premiered simultaneously in nine different German-speaking theaters in 1911, the main theme had changed: it was primarily about the fate of the aging man who, fearing the approaching end, had to prove himself through incessant affairs through incessant affairs that he was losing his vitality haven’t left yet. A strenuous undertaking in which Friedrich finally loses his nerve and shoots his wife’s young lover in a duel. Not out of erotic jealousy, but out of a vain desire not to be overtaken by youth.
hints and allusions
Otherwise not much happens. The tragicomic social play consists of a series of parlando conversations, an interplay of hints and allusions. The “society” here is the gambling-addicted adventure society of the pre-war period, which wants to distract itself with its constant search for adventure and always celebrates competition: one climbs dangerous mountain cliffs, plays tennis, exchanges forbidden kisses in a meadow. Sport and sex follow the same laws, it’s about victory or defeat, the feeling of triumph or that of being outclassed. That’s why Friedrich can’t understand why his wife Genia doesn’t play by the rules, that she resists the courtship attempts of a young pianist who kills himself just because she absolutely wants to remain faithful. Katharina Lorenz plays this woman, disgusted by her husband’s libertarian morality, as a martyr of truth who keeps her composure with all her might. Only at the end, when she dares to commit adultery out of revenge and thus provokes the death of a second young man, does Lorenz fall to the ground in silence, tear his shins open in the gravel and gasp a word that doesn’t actually occur in the vocabulary of the game-mad: “Out of”.
