Castle premiere

“Schachnovelle”: That’s all theater needs!

"Schachnovelle" at the Vienna Burgtheater(Bild: Burgtheater/© Tommy Hetzel)

Stefan Zweig's magical farewell work "Schachnovelle" as a gripping, brilliant solo by the universal artist Nils Strunk at the Burgtheater. This makes theater attractive again!

Of course, this is no coincidence: what the new Burg director has achieved so far is without exception the adaptation of prose texts. Not the rampant execution of classic novels with clumsily distributed roles. Rather, it's the almost unadorned concentration on the text, the story and the actors' art of transformation. After Rainald Goetz ("Holtrop"), Virginia Woolf ("Orlando") and Thomas Bernhard ("Holzfällen"), Zweig's farewell work "Schachnovelle" now benefits from this.

Nils Strunk here in the role of the doltish chess champion(Bild: Burgtheater /© Tommy Hetzel, Krone KREATIV)

The actor Nils Strunk, in this case also a composer and acrobatically bizarre silent film pianist, takes on the task alone with three jazz musicians. The process is tricky: the deathly sad story of a Nazi victim on the sea route to an exile without redemption as a highly entertaining two-hour solo? And how it works! Strunk takes his time with each of the characters. He uses brute slapstick, but also knows when all the punchlines have come to an end.

And now he applies these virtues to the classics of the theater. "Hamlet" and "The Imaginary Invalid" were harassed with post-dramatic nonsense. All power to the ingenious texts, the captivating stories and the actors' art of transformation!