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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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