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Peter Quince

Stories from Peter Quince

The Unicorn Ensemble
All Together Now: Well-Meaning Commune-ists
At the Akademietheater, Thomas Vintenberg’s Die Kommune is an honest homage to the “undertaking” of communal life
Peter Quince
01/02/2012

In Thomas Vintenberg’s 1998 film The Celebration, his hand-held camera peeked at a pater familias’ birthday bash as casually as any clueless guest.  But when the movie’s actual “moment of truth” came – when dad’s grown son stands up to describe the sexual abuse the

Joe Garcia
Passionate with Joe Garcia
There are only so many ways to live for art and love: This opera singer has finessed them
Peter Quince
31/01/2012

Joe Garcia, operatic bass, has lived for a dozen years in this town, but his bio isn’t exactly a tale from the Vienna woods. He is far from any of the usual opera stereotype; a hard worker, but Vienna has grown on him. “The living here is easy,” he maintained when I asked him why he’s stayed so long.

07 Bardel’s
A War of Words Waged from the Windows
Above trendy bars and food stalls, Armin Bardel’s words call out to a society just out of reach
Peter Quince
01/12/2011

Imagine Linke Wienzeile 22 – a plain 1850s egg carton of a building – as a giant refrigerator with 24 magnetic letters you can rearrange to catch, or attack, the world’s fancy.

09 Der zebrochene Krug
In a Spirited, Raw Staging, Kleist’s Comedy Gets Dirty
The layers of Matthias Hartmann’s exuberant production, Der zebrochene Krug, peel away amid mudslinging and disguise
Peter Quince
01/12/2011

Recently, Michael Maertens has essayed so many leading roles at the Burg/Akademietheater that you’d think they would replace the hinged stage door with a revolving one.  But as Judge Adam in Heinrich Kleist’s Der Zerbrochne Krug, currently at the Akademietheater, he literally outdoes himself – seeming to

Benjamin Britten's operas are now a staple of the viennese repertory | Illustration: Katarina Klein
With a ‘Turn of the Screw’
Benjamin Britten’s powerful chamber opera of innocence and possession: shimmering clarity, ambiguous and chilling.
Peter Quince
27/09/2011

To Benjamin Britten fans, and of course to fans of Henry James, who is still as unknown to German-speakers as Britten was 30 years ago, the Theater an der Wien is tossing a ghostly musical nosegay Sept. 14.

09 Chekhov’s Three Sisters and The Peasants
Castorf Does Chekhov
The German director brought Nach Moskau to the stage during Wiener Festwochen: some chortled, some made for the exits
Peter Quince
01/07/2010

Will Frank Castorf lie down with Chekhov before you lie down with Frank Castorf? The Berliner Volksbühne’s star director dropped by Festwochenville Jun. 11-13 with his Nach Moskau, Nach Moskau, a four-hour Russian-commissioned paroxysm cut wildly against the usual Chekhovian grain, where the Three Sisters is fitfully interspersed with Chekhov’s peasant story “Muzhiki.” Some chortled; some strolled resolutely for the exits.

Osage County, Austro-Hungarian Style
Proof that in drama, familiarity with “other cultures” tends to breed respect, not contempt
Peter Quince
01/04/2010

European dramaturges nowadays may have as much of a nose for prizes as the arts sections of U.S. newspapers. Tracy Letts’ play August: Osage County – winner of the Pulitzer and five main Tonys in 2008 – was sniffed first by Budapest’s Vígszínház in March 2009 (still in repertoire) but then skipped like a stone across Europe, premiering in Vienna at the Akademietheater in October.

09 Michael Maertens and Nicholas Ofczarek
The Pleasures of Excess
Stefan Bachmann’s production of Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio is an epic romp, a ‘wistful and witful’ soap opera in five acts
Peter Quince
01/02/2010

It’s Carnival in 16th-century Florence, so for Stefan Bachmann’s production of Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio, the Duke Alessandro di Medici (Nicholas Ofczarek) trundles up onto the Burgtheater stage wearing a nun’s costume, with his cousin Lorenzo (Michael Maertens) hobbling on in a trench coat, drenched in night sweat.

09 Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz
A Side Order of Jealousy
Peter Sellars’ uncut, fluid production of William Shakespeare’s Othello at the Wiener Festwochen: as unpretentious as customers in a Greyhound bus station
Peter Quince
01/07/2009

Peter Sellars, the least meretricious of master Regisseurs, offered the Wiener Festwochen public an uncut, transfixing production of Shakespeare’s Othello this June.

Genet's The Maids: The Futility of Revenge
A Languid New Production by Wiener Festwochen Director Luc Bondy of a Ceremonial Masterpiece
Peter Quince
18/02/2009

 

01 Border
On The Border
Martin Kušej’s powerful and sensual production of Schönherr’s Weibsteufel excites crowds at the Akademietheater
Peter Quince
02/02/2009
Some yearn for theater to tell us we’re all in it. Some yearn for theater to tell us we’re all in the same boat, despite our disparate woes — that even we, the respectful audience, can be united with actors grazing in some common tragic pasture.
But O’Neill or Ibsen addicts should take a look at Karl Schönherr’s Der Weibsteufel, a popular Austrian Volksstück (folk play) from 1914, which Austrian director Martin Kušej gave an important new staging at the Akademietheater in September 2008.
Reclaiming Catholicism
In Francis Poulenc's Only Opera, Cloister and Secular Revolution in Music Cast a Light on the Nature of Fear
Peter Quince
02/02/2009

Left in the lurch by that political/sexual beast we call fate, countless opera heroines from Tosca to Elisabeth in Tannhäuser suddenly and conveniently pray to God for—well, 'succour.' But French composer Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) must have felt he was getting at the quintessence of lyric fervency when he set a play by Georges Bernanos in 1957, Dialogues des Carmelites, concerning the agonized transformation of Blanche de la Force, daughter of a Marquis, to Sister Blanche of Christ's Fear of Death, against the background of the French Revolution. And since the French Revolution was not to be upstaged, as in real life, the nuns are guillotined in the last scene.

W. A. Mozart: A Know-It-All at 13
Two Operas of Youth and Age Reveal the Composer as a Irreverent Sexual Tease: Theater an der Wien Summer Staged La Finta Semplice and Le Nozze di Figaro
Peter Quince
02/09/2008

Does a thirty-year old com- pose with more technique than a thirteen-year-old? Or a thirteen- year-old more intuitively? We had opportunity to entertain such questions at the Theater an der Wien when it followed its July production of Wolfgang Ama- deus Mozart’s La Finta Semplice (1769) with an August one of his Le Nozze di Figaro (1786). In this summer of intuitively charged weather, there was just enough time in between to forget the two works are by the same composer — but was the thirteen-year-old the same artistic “self ” as the thirty-year-old?

A Smart Piece of Silly Putty
Slapstick Philosophy, Conundrums by Rene Pollesch In Das Purpurne Muttermal at the Akademietheater
Peter Quince
02/03/2008

In René Pollesch´s play Das Purpurne Muttermal (The Scarlet Birthmark), in repertory at the Akademietheater since November 2006, we are greeted by a lilac-colored salon shoved so precipitously close to the footlights it looks more like an existential corridor, with a large video screen above the mantelpiece. Topping that, in Gothic letters, is the stern question: 'DO I WANT TO ESCAPE?'

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