Peter Handke wrote theater history 60 years ago with the play “Audience Insultation”. The swear words from back then are hardly triggering today. But the new production reveals something different about today.
60 years ago, Peter Handke’s “audience insult” heralded a new era in Federal Republic theater. Overnight, the later Nobel Prize winner for literature and his premiere director, the recently deceased Claus Peymann, joined the avant-garde, doing away with “Grandpa’s Theater”. In the eloquent silence of the post-war period, “public insult” seemed like a clarion call for the student revolt. Director Claudia Bauer shows that the piece was at the same time a declaration of love for the theater and anticipated the paradoxes of post-dramatic theater with a new production in Frankfurt. But something crucial is missing.
Bauer initially ostentatiously leaves the audience out. The curtain opens and the ensemble – Torsten Flassig, Anna Kubin, Sebastian Kuschmann, Katharina Linder, Lotte Schubert and Andreas Vögler, with Arash Nayebbandi missing because he was briefly ill – appears in the middle of the rehearsal. You have to listen carefully a few times until the word “snot licker” crystallizes in various variations, which you later plan to hurl at the audience. But before the viewers, who have been so ostentatiously ignored, could become restless, the charm offensive begins. “You are the topic,” the actors trill and smile in the hall illuminated with party lights.
What Handke suggested 60 years ago as a re-centering of the stage perspective, away from the stage and towards the audience, is repeated today every day in the advertising industry, in politics and the other world of goods. The focus is no longer on the product, but rather on the affective service to the customer. From the obtrusively smiling Robert Habeck to the emotional advertising clip for supermarkets or hardware stores, it is increasingly about the emotional state of the audience, which, as with Handke, is consistently used by nicknames. But unfortunately Bauer’s production has little interest in how the immediacy pathos of the 1968 generation has been cynically realized today.
What Bauer highlights in “Audience Insult” is the musicality of the text. Mirja Betzer sets the rhythm with her conducting, Peer Baierlein’s music is recorded by Christopher Herrmann, Špela Mastnak and Ralf Merten. What does the text gain when you sing it? Doesn’t really make sense. What’s more interesting is how the actors rehearse the rebellion against the theater. “These boards mean no world,” they chant in unison. But the more you try to shake off everything theatrical on the stage, the more relentlessly it becomes clear that a real thing stripped of all symbolism, with which postmodern art has such obsessions, is not to be had. There is nothing real behind the pretense.
Do you play that you don’t play? Or do you no longer play that you play? The more consistently the text unfolds the inevitable and insoluble paradoxes of theater, the more even a great postmodern theater figure like René Pollesch, who died in 2024, almost seems like a footnote to Handke. And when the actors sit down in the same rows of chairs opposite the audience as in the hall and describe this as a “dramaturgical mistake” and “not true to life”, one is almost a little surprised at how aptly today’s authenticity discourses were already on stage 60 years ago. So nothing new in the theater?
Then insults are resorted to
You actually feel like you’re in a theater museum when, at the end, the actors line up the microphones, as in Peymann’s premiere, and launch into the eponymous insult. Not without carefully preparing the audience: you don’t have to feel like you’re being targeted or affected. Whether Handke can therefore be considered the inventor of the trigger warning, as the director, who was born in the year of the premiere, said in advance? In any case, Handke emphasized that only use swear words that the audience has in their mouths – from “red hordes” to “countryless fellows” and “asocials” to “anti-democrats”, but also “butchers” and “specialists who shoot in the neck”. Today it seems rather outdated.
The Frankfurt premiere audience accepted the musically spiced up tirade, which the text itself refers to as a “sound image” with a relativizing wink, without much emotion. It was completely different in 1966, when the actors and the author with a Beatles hairdresser were met with demonstrative applause and boos.
But critics noticed even back then that Handke didn’t just want to provoke, but had written a piece against the theater and for the theater – and also for and against the audience. The cheeky contact was an attempt to create a new relationship between stage and hall. The activist left also noticed this, who vilified Handke as an aesthete who was more interested in French structuralism than German Marxology.
The new production 60 years later does not dare to touch the relationship with the audience. Perhaps one should have at least attempted to combine Handke’s text with Sivan Ben Yishai’s “Stage Insult,” which premiered in 2023. So there’s just something missing to rub against. This can be understood as a symptom of the exhausted relationship simulation between stage and audience. More like a marriage suffocated in routines, the mere habit garnished with memories of the time we met 60 years ago. Actually, you don’t have anything more to say to each other, the text is just a sound image. No outburst to rekindle the extinguished love. Or to put it another way: If you don’t insult the audience, you probably don’t love them either.
“Audience Insultation” is running at the Schauspiel Frankfurt.
