Mayroker and Zweig revived the old Lehár theatre

The fact that the general renovation of the theatre, which opened in 1827, will not begin until 2025 is one of the downsides of the Capital of Culture programme. At least an interior installation designed by Dorit Ehlers, Thomas Beck and Arthur Zjobek gave you a good impression of this ambitious building project. The freely selectable tour, extending from the foyer or stage to the labyrinthine bowels of the house, left you shuddering rather than wondering. Instead of shabby elegance, one encounters a wealth of disliked additions and combinations from decades past, brought to literary life through careful temporal interventions.

While performers at two gaming tables in front of the stage introduced passers-by and strollers to Maywalker's texts in the form of a board game, inside the theater one encountered quotes and drawings, heard readings live or on tape, discovered a model railway layout and watched an animated film through a long telescope. It was an unconventional meeting with literature, and at the same time a not very difficult farewell to a ruined building, which, after its renovation, should once again become “a place of a culture of remembrance, encounters, discussion and reflection,” as city mayor Ines Schiller (SPÖ) puts it.

Africa is one of the focal points of the five-day theater festival, as is the dance project “De(con)fining” by Katherine Nederjord and Salimata Togura – a co-production of Bodø 2024 (Norway) and Festival sur le Niger. (Mali) – It premiered on Saturday afternoon. However, the basic theory of cultural exchange turned out to be more interesting than the 45-minute show, which was hampered by the absence of a dancer.

But the programmed festival, highlighting the “Europe Speech: Zweig” in the evening, has managed to live up to expectations and prove itself worthy of the Capital of Culture in every respect – in the theoretical sense, since it was based on a speech written by Stefan Zweig in the mid-1930s, but Never without a doubt, the play “Unification of Europe” succeeded, in practical terms, because six theaters from Turin, Stockholm, Budapest, Antwerp, Berlin and Hamburg participated in it. Everyone was given the same brief, which was to deal with Zweig's text in a piece lasting a maximum of 20 minutes with a maximum of three actors and minimal technical effort. What came out couldn't have been more diverse and added to a diverse evening lasting almost three hours.

Free interpretations of the task at hand prevailed. In “Appello all' Europe,” Torino Stabili's Micol Gala has three children, ages eight and eleven, combining Zweig's political dreams and his personal realities on a crooked, collapsing bed. The great young actors have shifted time and again from present-day stranded immigrant children to Zweig, his wife Lottie, and their never-born daughter.

Three women's monologues followed one another. Lisaboa Houbrechts from Toneelhuis Antwerp brought post-colonial aspects from a Belgian perspective. Accompanied by vivid sound design, Zofia Toth, from the Canton of Józef Szenház Budapest, links her biography to the idea of ​​Europe in a deliberately childish English. Thalia Theater Hamburg's Pauline Renvier stars in the 32-year-old's retro biopic, in which wars, crises and climate change are solved – by simply starting everything from the beginning.

The duo finished the evening. The Stockholm Dramatn sent Electra and Chrysothemis into the ring to return European culture to its beginnings. In the end, Tijana Thiesenhusen from the band Berliner showed what comes out when you ask people on the street their own thoughts about the situation in Europe. The situation report given by Jannik Muehlenweg and Valentin Kleinschmidt on stage was as thorough as the entire evening. Main gist: Hopeless, but not serious.

(By Wolfgang Huber Lange/APA)

(Service – European Theater Festival, today, Sunday, Lehár Theater Bad Ischl, Kreuzplatz 16, 4820 Bad Ischl, tickets on)