What will happen to the Alps when the snow has melted and tourism has come to an end? Fiston Mwanza Mujila addresses this question in his play “Après les Alpes”, which he wrote for the Volkstheater as a result of dealing with Elfriede Jelinek’s Kaprun play “In den Alpen”, which premiered in 2002. Claudia Bossard wove the two texts, which are not easy to grasp, into a dystopian double evening, which was enthusiastically acclaimed on Friday.
It is a kind of in-between world in which some of the 155 victims of the glacier railway catastrophe of 2000 are trapped: in a wrecked valley station, they ponder the senselessness of their horrible death, their missed opportunities in the future and the innocence with which thousands of people deal with each other day in, day out can be driven to the local peaks day in and day out. In the background, the huge glass wall reveals a glittering, self-revolving meteor that gives the setting another abstract level (stage: Elisabeth Weiss).
While a little boy realizes that from his family only the little brother who stayed with the grandparents will survive, a baggage carousel spits out more and more heaters. In the process, in which all 16 accused were acquitted at the time, one such person was finally given sole responsibility for the catastrophe. In 2020, Jelinek wrote the text “The machine is innocent!”, which Bossard woven into the piece and which Anna Rieser fervently recited. Jelinek had already worked Paul Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains” into the original text, with which she referred to the exclusion of Jews from the Alpine clubs and huts during National Socialism.
While the narrative of mass tourism and the Austrian phenomenon of denial of responsibility blossoms linguistically more and more colorfully, the stagehands remove more and more parts of the scenery until only the bare stage remains and there is a seamless transition to Mujila’s (slightly shorter) text. At the center is Julia Franz Richter, the exalted Ms. Gartner and her subsequent use project for the now tourist-free Alps. Why should people only toil in the mines in the Global South? After all, according to their research, the Alps are proving to be a true miracle of raw materials, and big money can be made from the sale of the mountains. As compensation, she offers the shocked population the replica of the Großglockner in cities like Vienna, Linz and Graz, which gets on the last nerves of a passionate descendant of a ski instructor dynasty (Nick Romeo Reimann). At Frau Gartner’s side, Uwe Rohbeck, one of her 32 children, fights for the idea of reverse colonization.
The events are not always easy to follow, often (more or less solid) singing and acrobatics (like repeatedly jumping from a meter-high airplane staircase) outshine the actual action. The exaltation of the protagonists, which sometimes tipped into the slapstick-like quality, brings a few laughs from the audience, but distracts from the linguistic subtleties – both in the case of Jelinek and her colleague who comes from the Congo and has lived in Graz since 2009. Nevertheless, Bossard managed to have a gripping evening over long stretches, which dealt with topics such as mass tourism, climate change, colonialism, racism and finally also Ischgl’s handling of the corona pandemic. That’s quite a lot for two and a quarter hours without a break. It is to be hoped that Mujila’s text will be performed on its own in the future. Because the next winter with a lack of snow is sure to come.
(SERVICE – “In den Alpen/Après les Alpes” by Elfriede Jelinek/Fiston Mwanza Mujila in the Volkstheater. Director: Claudia Bossard, stage: Elisabeth Weiss, costume: Mona Ulrich, video and sound: Annalena Fröhlich. With Nick Romeo Reimann, Julia Franz Richter, Anna Rieser, Uwe Rohbeck, Christoph Schüchner and Stefan Suske. Further dates: February 22 and March 26 and 31. www.volkstheater.at)