Tales From the Vienna Woods

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…