Tales From the Vienna Woods

Synopsis

Horvarth was a German-speaking Austro-Hungarian whose plays were banned during the Third Reich and rediscovered in the mid-sixties; and in this particular piece dating from 1930 he was writing a prophetic bourgeois tragic-comedy. Marianne, the heroine, is the daughter of a respectable toy-shop owner. She jettisons her fiancé, runs off with an opportunist layabout, has a baby by him and when she in turn is abandoned joins a night club dance troupe. After a head-long encounter with her father in a Viennese club, she is gaoled for theft and emerges to find that her baby had died through the gratuitous cruelty of her lover's Wachau grandmother...

Our Review:

15 October 2003

For the second time in this year's financially as well as theatrically accessible Travelex £10 season in the Olivier, the National Theatre revisits a former hit of the 1970s.

In the summer, His Girl Friday was a re-working of The Front Page, a massive hit for the theatre during Laurence Olivier's regime in 1971. Now, it takes a fresh look at Odon von Horvath's classic and influential piece of European theatre, premiered in Berlin in 1931 and previously staged at the National in early 1977, shortly after it moved to the South Bank.

Actually, in the way it combines an epic sweep with its acute revelation of intimate lives, Tales from the Vienna Woods resembles a more recent National hit. As with Owen McCafferty's richly populated Scenes from the Big Picture, of lives being lived in contemporary Belfast, von Horvath's play paints a beautifully detailed canvas of life in 1931 Vienna.

On ...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (216.192.135.131) - 11 November 2003:

I saw 19 plays in 14 days, and this was the absolute worst. Empty and meaningless. Just one big dark and chilly play. I didn't care about any of the characters. I was one of MANY who left at the interval. ...

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