Volkstheater premiere

“Fräulein Else”: fabulously acted, staged to death

Unfortunately only "loosely based on Schnitzler": Julia Riedler as the harassed Fräulein Else(Bild: © Marcel Urlaub // Volkstheater)

Austrian Julia Riedler takes Schnitzler's monologue "Fräulein Else" to great heights at the Vienna Volkstheater. But the work unfortunately sinks into babble.

With language and psychology - psychoanalysis turned into language - Austrian literature rose to the top of the world around 1900. Guided by Freud, Viennese modernism was born, and no one followed the instructions more precisely than the doctor Schnitzler. He needed neither slogans nor footnotes to set the fates of the times alight. And it was with the novella "Fräulein Else" that he most boldly penetrated the soul-killing neuroses. In an inner monologue, a middle-class girl makes a decision that ends in suicide: In order to save her indebted father from arrest, should she expose herself to a rich peeping Tom for fifteen minutes? As a metaphor for women as commodities, this is durable enough to be extrapolated to "Onlyfans" times even by limited viewers.

Julia Riedler(Bild: © Marcel Urlaub // Volkstheater)

Julia Riedler as Fräulein Else at the Vienna Vollkstheater(Bild: © Marcel Urlaub // Volkstheater)

It's a great challenge to be completely absorbed by the character in Else's stream of thought. Julia Riedler, a charismatic actress with a willingness to express herself, has the required stature. Unfortunately, she has fallen into the hands of director Leonie Böhm, and thus into the "post-dramatic" era, which is in retreat. In other words: language and psychology are sacrificed to the chatter of other people's texts and to the clowning around. You can't go more wrong than with Schnitzler.

The stylistic principle is armchair-circle-woke audience instruction, to which the first quarter of an hour is sacrificed. Then Schnitzler's text takes over in front of the Iron Curtain and we see an exciting, virtuoso, superbly acted psychogram. But it is broken as soon as it begins to take hold. The end of the monologue is given to the old lecher. And what Julia Riedler gives us to understand in her green underpants is like the efforts of a sixteen-year-old to get an A in her high school ethics exam.