Devourer Of Genius
Petra Reski/Die Zeit, Hamburg

As Alma climbs onto the kitchen table, a short gay man in a canary-yellow Hawaii shirt is sitting in her way. He makes graciously to move aside for her, but she has already stepped over him as if over a pot plant, hissing angrily as she rips up Mahler's music manuscripts and scorns his qualities as a lover. When she leaves the kitchen, the man in yellow smiles with relief: good thing he doesn't have a monster like that at home!

Alma a Venezia is more than a theatre play, it is an act of watching lives being lived, the life of enchantress and devourer of genius, Alma Mahler-Werfel, and those of her geniuses, Mahler, Werfel and Gropius. Bathing, being dumped, dying. A theatrical journey through Alma's life, from her first kiss with Gustav Klimt, to her beheading by Oskar Kokoschka, who was only able to liberate himself from her by tearing off the head of a life-size Alma doll.

With his production at the Palazzo Zenobio in Venice (daily until 21 September, tickets available from tel.: 0039-388/611 91 31), Viennese director Paulus Manker is following on from the success of the play Alma - A Show Biz ans Ende, performed at the Sanatorium Purkersdorf outside the city of Vienna, and which kept Alma's admirers going for several years. Indeed, one really does need to be on the go in order to enjoy Alma a Venezia, for author Joshua Sobol has created a polydrama: Alma's life runs synchronously in all the rooms and in the park of the Palace. Spectators decide for themselves which of the four Almas they wish to follow: whether to enter the music room, whether to watch Kokoschka's attempted rape (Paulus Manker), or whether to look into the bathroom and, with Werfel (Nikolaus Paryla), witness a display of Alma's anti-Semitism.

This is theatre that smells of life itself; after Mahler's funeral there is Wienerschnitzel.

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