"Illness or Modern Women - V°T//People's Theatre"

After the successful productions of humanistää! based on Ernst Jandl and MALINA based on Ingeborg Bachmann, director Claudia Bauer once again dedicates this season to great Austrian literature – and, 35 years after the equally successful and scandalous Austrian premiere at the Volkstheater, offers a new perspective on Elfriede Jelinek's absurd, bloodthirsty wordplay about clichés, prejudices, and male constructs of femininity. A vampiric delight! Well, have you already tasted blood? "Now I am unfortunately dead!" Dr. Heidkliff is a real man. He has his life under control. Dentist, gynecologist, sexually mature. Everything is in order with him; he is the norm. Women, on the other hand, well. Women are chaos, nature, exhausting, soulful, and significant, at least since antiquity. But they can give birth to new life! Perhaps even new male life, the junior boss or the heir to the throne. Amen and cheers. In all the deliveries at Dr. Heidkliff's practice, his fiancée, the diligent nurse Emily, assists him. However, she has also developed a taste for it: Two blood-dripping wooden stakes protrude from her chest, her canine teeth are oddly sharp – but "that, Emily, doesn't bother me at all, as long as you don't neglect the house." This changes when the next patient couple bursts through the door. Benno Hundekoffer is a tax consultant, and his wife Carmilla is pregnant for the sixth time. The birth seems to be going well, and the offspring is eagerly welcomed by Benno ("Whoops! There's someone in the lookout! This place is Vienna, which means Austria!"). But then Carmilla dies during childbirth, and Benno is briefly a bit sad about it. Emily, on the other hand – in a flirty mood and full of cravings from all the birth blood – saves Carmilla with a bold bite into her neck. This sets off a vampiric love affair – with two coffins as the marital bed. Blood bags from the doctor's office serve as provisions, and if necessary, the children are on the menu. However, Heidkliff and Hundekoffer are not at all thrilled about the unexpected subjectification of their wives – and they call for the ultimate hunt: "Wasteful seeders! I want to be war!" But the undead can no longer be appropriated... A linguistic excess, a discourse anatomy, a convention meat grinder: Elfriede Jelinek's KRANKHEIT ODER MODERNE FRAUEN, first published in 1984, is an absurd cosmos that breaks through the boundaries of theater and morality, against which neither garlic nor crucifix stand a chance. The production of the play in 1990 at the Volkstheater brought Jelinek to a large stage in Austria for the first time, becoming both a success and a scandal; the then-director Emmy Werner was even physically attacked for it. Now – a generation later – Claudia Bauer offers a new perspective on this text. After the successful productions of humanistää! based on Jandl and MALINA based on Bachmann, this is her third engagement with sensational Austrian literature.

Cast
Director: Claudia Bauer
Stage Design: Patricia Talacko
Costume Design: Andreas Auerbach
Dramaturgy: Matthias Seier