The premiere of Sobol's Alma a Venezia:
Paulus Manker's spectacular production

Yesteryear and Death in Venice
A Venetian palace with an overgrown Baroque garden on a bright moonlit night: thus Paulus Manker has found the ideal setting for his touring drama Alma a Venezia at the Palazzo Zenobio. A perfect location for Joshua Sobol's play on the life and death of femme fatale, muse, lover and wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel.
On Alma Mahler's 123rd birthday, four trucks travelled from the Sanatorium Purkersdorf to Venice: from the kitchen stove to the piano, from intellectual sustenance, in the form of books and music manuscripts, to gravestone crosses, wreaths and bathtubs, the items transported to the Palazzo Zenobio in the district of Dorsoduro were both incredible and innumerable. And no doubt, on top of the 28,000 candles burnt since the play first premiered at the Vienna Festival Week in 1996, by 21 September, a few thousand more will be either burnt or, indeed, melted by the Venetian heat of midsummer.

Humoresque and grotesque images smile down from the walls, and the "Fall of the Giants" on tiny fresco medallions appears to stand still as Manker's Alma a Venezia begins with a huge birthday party in the richly stuccoed ballroom. The lights flicker and blur in the gilded mirrors; melancholy pervades every mood, from emotional enslavement to paranoia, the discovery of identity and crises in love.
The audience, some of whom have travelled far to see the performance, quickly disperse, accompanying Alma and Franz Werfel on a boat trip along the canal, or following Alma to the kitchen, the cellar, and then to bed. Here, some seek a brief moment of tranquillity at the Alma shrine, with original video footage, mementoes and devotional objects from imperial times. Others eavesdrop on conversations in the garden or in adjacent rooms. It is all highly seductive.

These are indeed morbid settings, in a declining city, for a life-affirming woman, full of longing, and one who, for her day - the turn of the century - represented the height of modernity. Alma has returned to the place which, years before, she once fled following the death of her daughter Manon.

As a worldly, mature woman, speaking Italian and almost entirely succumbing to madness, TV star Milena Vukotic makes a big impression. For it is she, along with her three youthful counterparts - Lea Mornar as Alma 1, the composer, Nicole Ansari as impulsive Alma 2, and Wiebke Frost as resolute Alma 3 - who hold the play and the lives of the famous men in their hands.

Here too, Gustav Mahler's music is the driving force in the halls and rooms, cellars and secret corners of the Palace gardens; Manker powerfully stages the composer's funeral with a funeral march and departure of the coffin in a black gondola: a death in Venice. Only, instead of a Wagnerian death and the Palazzo Vendramin, now we have an opulently sensuous, artistically adorned visual feast. And this death too is avenged with sheer physical indulgence: Wienerschnitzel, apple strudel and Kapuzinerschnitten.

Acting talent - not the slightest bit jaded after an astounding total of 140 performances - is provided by Helmut Berger (Mahler), Xaver Hutter (Gropius), Nikolaus Paryla (Werfel) and Paulus Manker (Kokoschka): they bring a past era into a dying city with roots still deeper in the past, and which will soon be imbued with the melancholy of September-time, the first fogs of the season drifting in from the sea. Yet Manker's thrilling theatre spectacle, from which everyone can, should, and indeed is compelled to come away with their own individual impression, ensures a superlative evening not only in Vienna, but in Venice too. Something for fans, connoisseurs, or those just lucky enough to be passing through town.
Kronenzeitung/Saturday, 24 August 2002

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