Monumental Drama? Participatory Comedy! ‘Merlin’ at the Akademietheater

Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler’s monumental drama ‘Merlin or The Wasteland’ has finally reached Vienna, 45 years after its creation. At the Akademietheater, director Antú Romero Nunes has given the sprawling work a radically lighter form: three and a half hours plus an interval instead of nine hours, and nine actors and three musicians instead of 45 roles.

The cuts appear to do the work a favor. Its reputation may partly rest on its sheer scale, but the earnestness of the 1980s no longer sits comfortably in 2026. Nunes instead turns the Arthurian world into an exuberant piece of participatory theater, complete with clapping, singing, percussion and confetti cannons.

At the center is Merlin, played by Sarah Viktoria Frick. Like an inverted version of Goethe’s Mephisto, he is a force that wants good but repeatedly produces evil. The devil, played by Marie-Luise Stockinger, urges him toward destruction, yet Merlin resists and tries to bring salvation. Again and again, however, his efforts fail because of human beings. Even his ability to manipulate time cannot change the outcome.

Dorst used the invented Arthurian Grail story to portray the many-sided failure of utopias. The Round Table begins as a proto-democratic project built on equality, dialogue among equals and peace. It ends in piles of corpses. Nunes stages this collapse with deliberately childish pleasure, mixing theatrical playfulness with a language inspired by Middle High German.

The invented speech is packed with forms such as ‘mîn’, ‘liut’ and ‘âventiure’, while words are reshaped into forms like ‘triuwe’, ‘vrouwe’ and ‘minnen’. The effect is deliberately alienating, but it can also be difficult to understand. Because the actors use it inconsistently, the result ranges from Swiss German and Alemannic to Low German and pseudo-minnesong. Lancelot, played by Lilith Häßle, speaks comparatively standard German, fitting the character’s legendary French origins.