Volkstheater premiere

Rituals of downfall in Luk Perceval’s “Rome”

"Rome" at the Vienna Volkstheater(Bild: © Marcel Urlaub / Volkstheater)

Belgian theater magician Luk Perceval takes on Shakespeare's Roman dramas at Vienna's Volkstheater: "Rome" is no easy exercise for the audience and yet it fascinates.

That was 25 years ago, in the golden age of the Salzburg Festival, when the Belgian Luk Perceval fascinated audiences with a company that was out of the ordinary. "Battles" spanned Shakespeare's royal dramas in twelve hours, just as Giorgio Strehler had done decades earlier with "Play of the Mighty". Close to the bloody originals, Perceval had created his own cosmos with the author Tom Lanoye.

Commissioning the now 66-year-old theater magician with the complementary enterprise was therefore an exciting idea: "Rome" brings together Shakespeare's four Roman dramas, this time in a handy two-and-a-half-hour length. And here, too, it is about power and its price: about revenge in "Titus Andronicus"; about the incompatibility of the laws of war and restored peace in "Coriolan"; about the techniques of exercising power in "Julius Caesar"; "Antony and Cleopatra", finally, is the story of an erotic forfeiture against reasons of state to the point of self-destruction, which can be read as pacifist or as a record of impending doom.

To follow Perceval and his Austrian co-author Julia Jost, however, you would have to immerse yourself in thick Shakespeare manuals. Even the paths taken are difficult to identify, not to mention the personnel. It's more like being at a cultic-sacred event, underpinned by the psychedelic live music of Lila-Zoé Krauß. The translation of the Shakespeare texts is also somewhat academic, and the whole thing is overloaded with educational ballast in the form of countless quotations.

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And yet what Perceval and his set designer Philip Bußmann create here on an almost empty stage of light and language has more format, size and will to create a world than anything recently seen on Viennese stages. The text work is excellent, the ensemble is brilliant. The battle of the sexes between Julia Riedler and Frank Genser alone deserves a visit. Compliments also to Runa Schymanski, Friederike Tiefenbacher, Lavinia Nowak, Andreas Beck, Stefan Suske, Uwe Rohrbeck and the murmuring witches Evi Kehrstephan and Claudia Sabitzer. In short: you wander through the events and are never bored for a moment.