Brecht play opens new theatre director’s tenure in Lower Austria

Patricia Nickel-Dönicke will open her tenure as director of the Landestheater Niederösterreich, a theatre in Lower Austria, with Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui on Saturday. In an interview with ORF, she said the play also reflected Austria’s political situation and expressed concern about recent developments.

The opening will follow a theatre festival in the afternoon. The production brings together all 11 members of the theatre’s ensemble and has been developed by 11 directors, who will each work on their own production with the actors during the season.

Nickel-Dönicke said the decision to programme the play was made about a year and a half ago, partly in response to Austria’s political climate. As a former citizen of East Germany, she said she felt ashamed and worried about developments in the former East Germany.

“The skinheads of the 1990s in my home state of Brandenburg are still very present to me,” she told the Austria Press Agency. “Suddenly I see them walking through St. Pölten too. That frightens me.”

She attributed the rise of the far right in eastern Germany partly to the “losers’ mentality” that followed reunification and the rapid change of political and economic systems. She also cited the desire for simple answers to complex problems and the search for scapegoats.

These themes, she said, were central to Arturo Ui. The play raises the question of whether the Alternative for Germany’s result in Saxony-Anhalt could have been prevented and how that might have been achieved.

Asked whether the Freedom Party’s presence in the Lower Austrian state government had affected her work, Nickel-Dönicke said she had been free to choose the plays and assemble the company during her preparations. She said she had so far been welcomed openly and warmly, while acknowledging that she was following cultural policy developments in other parts of Austria, including Styria.

Nickel-Dönicke said Brecht himself had pointed the production towards using different theatrical methods to make the material relevant beyond its gangster story. The directors selected individual scenes and are combining them with transitions into a theatre evening lasting about two and a half hours.

Members of the former citizens’ theatre project have also joined the company. In Arturo Ui, they are called “the silent middle”: people who look out of the window from behind the curtain and say they cannot do anything. They will also appear in two further productions, including The Geierwally.