2023-04-23 08:47:58
Once upon a time… War in Europe. When the Croatian playwright Tena Štivičić wrote her generational play “Three Winters” in 2014 as a commission for the National Theater in London, she was thinking of the Second World War and the Balkan War. Nine years later, current shots from the Ukraine are added to the images of war that Burgtheater director Martin Kušej is now projecting onto the stage. At the premiere on Saturday it became clear: upheavals come suddenly.
The history of Croatia in the second half of the 20th century, which is told here using the years 1945, 1990 and 2011, is a prototypical example of the effects of the political on the private, of external constraints that cause internal disruptions. For the three winters, which are set in one and the same house in Zagreb, Annette Murschetz has created identical old building living rooms on the revolving stage, which remain largely empty apart from a few pieces of furniture – sometimes a washing machine, sometimes a desk, sometimes a television set. These are the abandoned rooms of an aristocrat who fled to Argentina after the end of the Second World War and who once collaborated with the Nazis. The expropriated house is given to new residents in the first scene. What they have no idea – the daughter of the head of the house has returned to her parents’ house after escaping from the psychiatric ward and there, of all people, meets the former maid who dumped her on the street two days after the birth of her daughter.
This baby – Ruža – is now a young partisan who moves into the apparently abandoned house together with her newborn daughter Masha, her war-disabled husband and her mother (Sylvie Rohrer). Nina Siewert gives this young, combative woman a good portion of defiant superiority and unshakeable ideology. She plays this in a double role in 2011 as Ruža’s granddaughter Alisa, who has long since turned her back on Croatia, lives in London and only for the wedding of her sister Lucija (at the tipping point to nationalism and capitalism around Croatia’s EU accession wonderful blinded: Andrea Wenzl) has returned to her parents’ house. Here in the 21st century, a dispute quickly develops over the alleged right to ownership of the house that three families have shared for the past 60 years.
While the figures stagger over thick layers of broken dishes in 1945, the family of 1990 struggles with their own poverty on the occasion of Ruža’s funeral on dry farmland. Here, on the threshold of the outbreak of war, it is Mascha’s sister Dunja (Zeynep Buyraç), who found happiness in Germany and went to her mother’s funeral in Zagreb with a critical eye from the outside, where she learns that her (also Croatian) husband has become an ardent nationalist, ready to take up arms for Croatian independence.
The rapid scene changes, which take place rapidly with the help of the revolving stage and projected images of war, stand in stark contrast to Kušej’s decelerated direction. Often only little seems to be happening, and the pauses that are set are often more meaningful than what has just been said. Here a family is constantly struggling with the political upheavals that are driving a wedge in the hoped-for family happiness. Regina Fritsch as Masha is a strong matriarch at the center who, on the eve of her daughter’s wedding, wonders whether it was right to marry her now husband (consistently fighting the slipper: Norman Hacker). As a personified bad conscience, Barbara Petritsch has strong moments as dispossessed aristocrat Karolina, while Sylvie Rohrer as Ruža’s mother and former maid in the house never found self-confidence.
The men who revolve around these many strong women stand out above all through big words and less big deeds. In addition to Hacker, Daniel Jesch, as Dunja’s husband who has been crushed by history, also finds himself on a brutal defensive path. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 1945, 1990, 2011 (or 2023 in Kušej’s interpretation): In her play, Tena Štivičić makes it clear that personal striving for stability, justice and peace must fail if the political circumstances do not allow it. A strong evening, a little too long at three and a half hours, which tells more than just part of European history. Hearty applause.
(SERVICE – “Three Winters” by Tena Štivičić, director: Martin Kušej. Set: Annette Murschetz, costumes: Heide Kastler. With, among others, Nina Siewert, Regina Fritsch, Barbara Petritsch, Daniel Jesch and Norman Hacker. Further dates: 2nd, 9th ., May 11. www.burgtheater.at )
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