Vienna Theater: “The Incommensurables”: Going underground via breakbeat

The “Incommensurables” by Raphaela Edelbauer is a loose, sometimes turbulent sequence of scenes about the last hours of humanity before the general mobilization in Vienna at the end of July 1914. This landed her on the longlist for the German Book Prize 2023. The artist collective Sputnic, directed by Nils Voges, turned the novel into a “live animation cinema”. It offers a potpourri full of Viennese delicacies from the fin de siècle.

The wading concert, the psychoanalysis, social reports by Max Winter, the imperial court portrayed as comically reactionary out of time, the subculture of the metropolis and the social situation in the slums are some of the ingredients of this cultural history confection. Imaging trick tables are used live. The history of the rumblings of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, drawn in the graphic novel explanatory style of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, lands on a movable backdrop made of slatted curtains via overhead projection. Above all, the busy attachment of all four actors to the hand projectors prevents a full-length connection.

The well-read farmhand Hans Ranftler (Hardy Emilian Jürgens) gets stranded at Vienna’s South Station while searching for the psychoanalyst Helene Cheresch (Gerti Drassl), who apparently also advertises in Alpine valleys. There he is immediately joined in the tumbling maelstrom of young men reporting to the Rossau barracks. Hans has a kind of ability to listen ahead: he often knows sentences in his head before they are even spoken somewhere. At the end of the story, he feels that he is so gifted that he is committed to a historic task: he wants to make this special hearing ability available to the Austro-Hungarian military for remote listening spying.

But first he gets to know his therapist’s other patients: Klara Nemec is a young queer woman from a poor suburban family, a socialist with a gift for mathematics (Anna Rieser). And then there is the arriving aristocratic officer, viola player and Schönberg fan Adam Jesenky (Fabian Reichenbach). Klara, the Tyrolean horse journeyman learns, is the center of a dream cluster in which, night after night, hundreds of analysands dream of the same village, like mosquitoes are insatiably attracted to the mysterious glow of a chandelier. The three of them are now moving through Vienna.

Unfortunately, after a teaser about psychoanalytic Vienna, this symbolistic framework and the complicated constellation of characters only have a loose connection with the following scenes. The basis of the novel also wants a lot, describes small Viennese specialties with pinpoint accuracy, but conveys little more than a collector’s sticker album about the turn of the century.

The three young people attend a concert rehearsal of Arnold Schönberg’s second string quartet. During a break, the ensemble discusses the national question and a fight breaks out. Injured, the troop arrives at the Jesenky Palace, where the horse journeyman is overwhelmed by its architectural dimensions and pomp. Adam takes a healing bath.

At dinner on the occasion of the offspring’s longed-for war training, they meet not only Adam’s authoritarian dad but also the crisis team of the military chancellery, who, well-fed in the armchair, ponders the civilian victims that are to come. Klara, as the fence-sitter at this briefing, tries to influence this highly decorated group of warmongers in a spirit of peace, but is met with militant incomprehension – the trio is indignantly asked out of the dining room.

The avant-garde Café Meininger continues with hard liquor. Klara is having fun with a friend; A blowjob is played on the wall using a paper cut, which the inexperienced Hans shamefully interrupts. The three are washed up in the Trabant techno club. With loud beats and costumed with fairy lights, a shimmering white-blue atmosphere under the legendary chandelier creates the right ambience for the trio to go on a heroin trip.

After a night of partying, Klara has a visit to her horrible mother in the suburbs the next morning and the rigorosum to obtain her doctorate in the university building on Ringstrasse – but the exam is stormed by German nationalist troublemakers. At the sudden end, Hans, startled by Vienna’s simmering underground, stumbles back onto Cheresch’s couch, who gently suggests that he has psychosis.

This animated evening projects a series of typical Viennese spices and cares little for its players, sloshing back and forth between disparate approaches. However, the soundscape of the city is wonderfully captured by Fiete Wachholtz’s composition of all sorts of noises and music, and above all the surround sound installation by Stefan Feheregyhazy shows the multimedia possibilities of the theater.

Next performances: December 21st, January 14th, January 31st

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