Automatenbüfett

Critics like to compare the author to Ödon von Horváth, often to her disadvantage. And yet especially her female characters are tough fighters who will take what’s theirs against all resistance – quite unlike Horváth’s forlorn damsels. At the outset of the play, a young woman called Eva (Katharina Lorenz) is prevented by a certain Mr Adam (Michael Maertens) from taking her own life. From this point on, Eva feels obliged to support Adam in his passionate pursuit of a whimsical project: He wants to breed carp. Not exactly the beginning of a play about female empowerment as we would see it today, but this particular Adam-and-Eve-relationship will shift over the course of the story.

Director Barbara Frey’s production at the Vienna Akademietheater is as laid-back as it is sensitive and manages to avoid the genre-typical allocation of victimhood in this petit bourgeois cabinet of curiosities. The set is an eye-catcher: Martin Zehetgruber has literally hoisted an over-dimensioned automat into the theatre. It spits out sausages and beer at the drop of a coin, and stage musician Tommy Hojsa will also only play for cash.

Frey has committed her company to an artificial movement vocabulary; everything happens with deliberate slowness. It’s not the grand gesture that counts here, but an eye for detail. The director defies simple naturalism; circumstances are portrayed in all their ruthlessness and a cohesive and outstanding ensemble performance conjures them on to the stage. “Automatenbüfett” is subtle and rough-spun, deeply sad and uproariously funny. An entire world on a stage.