The Earthquake Concert

For this performance, the Austrian-Russian director Ira Süssenbach re-worked the farce “Earthquake-Concerto”, originally written by George Tabori (2002) for the “Berliner Ensemble”. The original cast is reduced to three characters, but extended by a string quartet.

The world is turning and yet everything always stays the same. Everything’s the same, but worse. Life makes no sense and is still the nicest thing God gave us. To endure this dichotomy – who, if not Tabori could understand that? A short summary of his life gives an answer: Born 1914 in Hungary, later emigrated to the US, but became a central figure in European theatre from 1971 to his death in 2007. Under different circumstances, these three characters would never have met. Yet, the circumstances are what they are: A relaxed evening in a mental health institution is disturbed by the mean musical gods, who have prepared a shattering experience for the characters. In a collective attempt to oust the losses of the past and the fears of the future from their minds, the three characters entertain themselves with harmless games, but keep the backdoor to the abyss of human (and canine) existence wide open. Existential pain and the search for intimacy, security or inspiration lead to surprising twists within this triangle of “prisoners”. As Shakespeare put it:

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact”

This staging is walking the tightrope between macabre humor and life-affirming morbidity, closing in on the frontier between absolute freedom and total insanity.

The Max Reinhardt Seminar is the School of Drama at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria. It is located in the Palais Cumberland in Vienna’s 14th district. Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), Austrian actor, director, indendant and producer, founded a drama seminar in 1929 in the imperial theatre in the Schönbrunn Palace. After Reinhardt’s emigration in 1937, the seminar moved to the nearby Palais Cumberland in 1940.

The Seminar offers a four-year course taught by some 50 professors, many of whom are themselves notable actors and directors. The acting and directing programmes at the Max Reinhardt Seminar are practice-oriented—a fact that is not contradicted by the great importance accorded to theoretical and scholarly subjects in these programmes. A special characteristic of training at the Max Reinhardt Seminar is the combined teaching of acting and directing students that takes place in numerous areas. Asfor performances, the Seminar has three stages available: the Palace Theatre Schönbrunn, the New Studio Stage and the Old Studio Stage.