Albee’s modern classic at the Burgtheater in Vienna is a brutal success. Mostly due to the ingenious mise en scène by a clever director and stage designer.
When it was first performed back in the 1960’s Albee’s play about a marriage that falls to pieces was unsettling because of the exaggerated crudeness with which the two characters – Martha and George – seem to celebrate this, enumerating their quirks, shortcomings, dark secrets and failures in life. This display of the intimacy of a decaying academic middle class addicted to alcohol and prone to verbal abuse and (once drunk enough) even physical violence was in sharp opposition to the morals and ideals of a rather prude 1950’s post-war America. Yet, almost fifty years later, theatre-goers are used to public displays of dysfunctional marriages, hypocrisy and dirty laundry washed in public. The yellow press feeds on gruesome divorces of prominent couples, pictures of the latest quarrel between married members of the “upper crust” put food on the tables of the families of the paparazzis and “Desperate Housewives”, one of this season’s most successful TV-series, is consumed as prime-time entertainment in the mind-numbing comfort of your living-room lounge-chair.
So why is this play still challenging and thought-provoking when performed on stage? Mostly because of the sensibility and the genius of the director and the stage designer. Jan Bosse and Stéphane Laimé create a stage where George and Martha live in a sort of life-sized doll house – a box filled with an exaggerated amount of IKEA furniture and a library full of whisky bottles. The “fourth wall” is dissolved, the lights stay on, the spectators don’t sit in the shadows and watch, but they participate in the dissolution of George and Martha’s marriage and the deconstruction of Mitzi and Nick’s apparently idyllic married life. Throughout the play the décor becomes somewhat of a fifth character who reflects the wounds that the acting characters inflict upon each others. Wheter it is Martha (played by Christiane von Poelnitz) that openly despises her husband for not having worked harder for his academic career, or wheter it is George (Joachim Meyerhoff) that blames his wife for her alcohol addiction and resulting bad manners, or Nick (Markus Meyer) that admits having married his wife just for her money and in turn feels tricked into the marriage due to a hysteric pregnancy by Mitzi (Katharina Lorenz) that forced him to marry her. Glass is shattered, the library kicked over and plaster board walls are torn down, an imaginary son gets killed in the process.
Pretty much in tone with the Albee’s idea that the harmonious bourgeois marriage is nothing but façade and a phony self-image the costumes suggest a certain artificiality – Mitzi, the ingenuous young wife is styled like a Barbie doll, her husband Nick, with his plastered-on blond hair and fake sculpted muscular torso is reminiscent of Ken, Barbie’s notorious a-sexual boyfriend. Mitzi and Martha both wear skin color leotards and bodices underneath their clothes, which both shape their bodies to conform with the molded perfection of a Barbie doll and at the same time annihilate their attractiveness the moment they undress.
The play closes with shattered dreams, shattered relationships and the collapsed illusion of a middle-class existence. Yet the end is left open by a stroke of genius by the director. The destroyed doll-house slips away off scene, and with a remarkable deus ex machina effect the same doll-house that took the hit from the clash between George and Martha is resurrected along with the same but now again intact IKEA furniture, the bottles and the library. As if nothing had happened.
