Playfulness Until the Blood Flows: “The Wildest Day” at the Kammerspiele

Peter Turrini’s “The Wildest Day” begins in comic excess but ends with blood. In Anna Stiepani’s new production at Vienna’s Kammerspiele, Susanna herself stabs the count who has tried to force her into submission. Then the stage falls silent, leaving only a brief image of the countess, Susanna and Figaro, all holding knives as shadows.

The question is whether the three of them acted together. Stiepani offers no answer. Her ending, accompanied by an image from Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” invites the audience to puzzle over what happened.

Turrini wrote his adaptation of Beaumarchais’ “The Marriage of Figaro” after the student revolt of 1968, whose failure had disappointed him. His early plays, including “Rozznjagd,” “Sauschlachten” and “Kindsmord,” expressed a fierce belief that “the system” had to be overcome, even overthrown. But when he turned to Beaumarchais’ comedy, he concluded that its idea of wit defeating violence was an illusion. “Violence is stronger than wit: that is the theme of my play,” he wrote in a foreword.

His version removed the wedding and the reconciliation. When the count attacks Figaro’s fiancée Susanna with a whip over his claim to the right of the first night, Figaro strangles him with it. Turrini left the question of revolution unresolved. The word appears as the final alarm call of the court intriguer, while the French Revolution followed five years after Beaumarchais’ 1784 premiere in reality.

Stiepani’s production does not substantially expand the traces of solidarity between the countess and Susanna. Instead, it throws itself into the play’s crude, frenetic comedy. A woodcut-style set covered in marble-patterned wallpaper provides hiding places, alongside a stubborn harpsichord and an unseen trampoline. The actors use every opportunity to let the farce run wild.

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Violence is stronger than wit: that is the theme of my play.