Heldenplatz

Synopsis

Bernhard’s last play, it was condemned by then-Chancellor Kurt Waldheim as an affront to the Austrian people. With the surrounding controversy, Bernhard changed his will to ban all publications and performances of his work, which centres on an intellectual Viennese Jewish family, in his native Austria.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 15 February 2010

The Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard, who died twenty years ago, has been dutifully produced here a few times but we never really get the point.

Or we didn’t, until this bracing and revelatory revival of his last play, which caused a storm in Vienna and incurred the wrath of the president Kurt Waldheim, whose Nazi past was a subject of international controversy at the time of the premiere in 1988.

It’s that stain of anti-Semitism, and sense of bourgeois stasis, that informs the bile and anger of Bernhard’s play, which is essentially a posthumous biography of, and lament for, a professor who has killed himself.

Although the production has been a bumpy ride - co-director Annie Castledine has been ill in the later stages, leaving Annabel Arden to pick up the slack - the end result is three highly compelling, unusually long and urgently performed scenes in which the professor’s staff and family pick at the bones of national identity....

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Latest User Review

Elisabeth - 17 February 2010:

Surely, not an easy play with only telling the story in flashbacks, but with very strong performances from Barbara Marten, Hannah Boyde and Clive Mendus as brother of the dead Professor, worth watching. Maybe too continental for some....

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