Burgtheater premiere

McNeal’s journey to hell is an actors’ feast

Brilliant as father and son: Joachim Meyerhoff (left) and Felix Kammerer.(Bild: Burgtheater / Tommy Hetzel)

Ayad Akhtar's intricate conversational thriller "The McNeal Case" impresses at the Burgtheater thanks to outstanding actors.

Traps are laid everywhere in the play: In passages, the American Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar announced, he had used artificial intelligence himself to watch it fail, at the same time warning against it. The text, brilliantly translated by Daniel Kehlmann, is thus in a constant limbo between the art of conversation and virtuoso banality. A spectacular cast is needed to bring this to the height of a first-class evening.

Fortunately, Joachim Meyerhoff has returned home for the production, and he sparkles in all facets between charm and patheticness. The brilliant writer he plays, Jacob McNeal, is an exploiter of himself and others.

He has drunk himself half to death and is now so exhausted that he has given his Nobel Prize speech to an AI and passed off a manuscript by his wife, who committed suicide, as his own. The play deals with these themes: doesn't it ultimately depend on the result for eternity? Can a genius misappropriate other people's texts and fates? What justifies the higher purpose?

This is dealt with most convincingly in the scene between McNeal and his son: Can the oppressive father, who feeds the offspring, be held responsible for the latter's failure in life? Felix Kammerer narrates this brilliantly. Even before that, he has delighted the audience with his spot-on sarcasm in the episode of an agency assistant.

The play loses its way when McNeal has to accuse himself of #Metoo in a somewhat nerdy, rambling self-incrimination. The interview scene with Safira Robens is the weakest; Dorothee Hartinger and Zeynep Buyrac are much better served. Director Jan Bosse and his set designer Stéphane Laimé rely on the incessant use of video technology, but don't significantly disrupt the acting fest.