Graz Playhouse

Vampire “Carmilla” sucks her own blood

A couch landscape in pink plush as the setting for the vampire satire(Bild: Lex Karelly)

You can't take this text seriously: Sheridan La Fanu's novella "Carmilla" is considered an original text of the vampire genre. Nevertheless, director Luise Voigt and her team refuse to stage it faithfully at the Schauspielhaus Graz. Their "Carmilla" is a shrill satire that ultimately fails.

With the 1872 novella "Carmilla", Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu secured Styria a place in the history of the vampire myth: The innocent Laura (Anna Klimovitskaya), who in it falls for the advances of the vampiress Carmilla (Annette Holzmann), causing panic among her father (Sebastian Schindegger) and all the men who surround her, is like a bloody blueprint for the genre. For decades now, it has been discussed that this genre also reveals a lot about the historical treatment of sexual minorities and female desire: Hysteria, persecution and extermination - what every vampire in literature faces, lustful women and queer people also experienced.

"Conspiracy against the text"
Director Luise Voigt addresses this fact in her adaptation of "Carmilla" at the Schauspielhaus Graz. Although you can't really call it an adaptation because Voigt and her team (the play was developed collectively with the ensemble) don't even take the original seriously - not entirely unjustified, one might say, as "Carmilla" is 19th century trash literature. Instead, the ensemble stages a "conspiracy against the text", as one of the actors puts it in the play.

Marielle Layher, Anna Klimovitskaya and Sarah Sophia Meyer on the couch(Bild: Lex Karelly)

So what does this conspiracy look like? All means of exaggeration are used to take the absurd role clichés that the text has to offer to the point of absurdity in an excessively comic manner: The characters appear in varnish and lace (stage and costume: Maria Strauch), not only looking like a mix of porn and sitcom, but also talking like one. In between, there are folk culture allusions and karaoke versions of pop hits: What is initially hilarious - such as when Dominik Pohl introduces the round dance as a whip-wielding dominatrix cat and later reappears as a priest - quickly wears thin, however, and soon you can only smile mildly.

The production is self-explanatory
It is much worse, however, when the production begins to verbalize its own view of the text - which is more than evident in the exaggeration anyway. The members of the ensemble repeatedly step out of their roles, comment on the action in inserts and point out contemporary references (conservative backlash, initial restrictions on minority rights, etc.).

Laura (Anna Klimovitskaya) and Carmilla (Annette Holzmann)(Bild: Lex Karelly)

None of this is wrong - on the contrary, it is important to give all these positions a stage. But in this satirical-moral crossfire, the audience is not really offered any more points of reference. Almost everything you can think of regarding the problems presented is formulated on this evening.

And even the intended climax of the evening, a sensually captivating dream sequence (video & music: Frederic Werth, Nicolas Haumann), in which an alternative to common norms of gender and sexuality is evoked with relish, ends in a schoolmasterly lecture that once again leaves the audience no room for maneuver. This production ultimately becomes a vampire itself. It sucks all the blood out of the evening itself.