self-incrimination

The successful Viennese production SELBSTBEZICHTIGUNG is not a drama in the classical sense; there is no plot that unfolds. Rather, we experience a stream of language that circles the self, holds it fast, releases it again, and binds it anew. A text that rises like a litany and yet, at the same time, repeatedly collapses in on itself.

The exceptional actress Stefanie Reinsperger does not perform the text – she unleashes it. Changes of dialect, tempo, ironic breaks, vocal escalations. A virtuoso fireworks display that uses Handke’s text more as material than as a space for inner exploration. Peter Handke’s SELBSTBEZICHTIGUNG, which premiered in 1966, represents in a sense a complementary counterpart to the preceding “Publikumsbeschimpfung”. The audience is not attacked, but elevated to the highest authority, as if it were a court or a god.

As if following the motto ‘Whoever lives, disturbs’, the text demonstrates the mistakes that accompany every life’s journey. Where Handke attempts not to attribute culpable behaviour to personal weaknesses, Dušan David Pařízek takes the opposite approach: he makes the impersonal personal again.

○ “Which laws of the theatre have I transgressed?” Peter Handke

○ “Stefanie Reinsperger has made Peter Handke’s spoken play ‘Selbstbezichtigung’ her own. A triumph at the Akademietheater.” Die Presse Vienna

Selbstbezichtigung | Burgtheater