The Sex Game

The soldier has sex with the prostitute, the prostitute with the count, the count with the actress and the actress with the poet. And so it goes on and on, because in this play it is instinct and not civilisation that rules. The theatre play “Reigen” (“Round Dance”)  by fin de siècle Viennese playwright and physician Arthur Schnitzler is a loose sequence of ten sketches: In each sketch two people meet for sex and have some conversations, before sex, after sex, and maybe also while having sex. Then one person from the scene reoccurs in the next scene, now with another mating partner, and that is how the round dance builds. This simple but genius dramaturgy and the subject of the play in general were obviously sufficient to create one of the greatest theatre scandals of modernity including politically organized protests, shout outs, canceled performances all across Europe, a brawl in a theatre in Berlin, a brawl in the Austrian parlament and a court trial where actors were accused for the fact of “obscenity”. Arthur Schnitzler himself finally banned the staging of the play in the year 1922 and this ban was intact until no less than 1982. 

What wonderful material for an acting course.

As part of their acting education at Schauspielschule Wien, 13 students of mixed age, all slightly advanced beginners level, worked with me once a week over a span of 9 months (altogether approximately 100 hours) on a staging of this play. 

Out came a quite funny performance, including highlights such as a striptease or experiments on the role of skin in audio porn. But first we had to get rid of some moral-but-superficial interpretations. Schnitzler’s dialogues are sophisticated, people never talk in full awareness of what they do, they are deeply subjective, they are blind for the larger whole and, especially in this play, they are driven by forces that are larger than self-control. It is exactly that sharply shaped subjectivity that makes all Schnitzler plays, even this one, which is really among the lighter ones he has written, so hard and objective in their view on the human. Arthur Schnitzler knew well of the various interests at play and he knew that none of the protagonists would give anything as a gift.

A practice of deep reading was a substantial part of the course. We searched for motives and goal-orientation for each character. In order to widen the eye, the students had to contribute  little presentations on topics as sex, contraception, diseases and hygiena in Vienna around 1900, on demographics and urban development of the city, its intellectual and artistic forces , on the above mentioned scandal, on Schnitzler as an author, on Schnitzler as a physician and also on Schnitzler’s not exactly monogamous sexual life. We also fed in a chapter on casual sex by evolutionary psychologist David Buss. 

Little by little an image emerged: These were all figures without names in a city that was overwhelmed with migrants from the rural areas, who would seek their path upwards on the social ladder, in a city where some would eat from silver spoons but still, like all others, had to expect to die from something as ridiculous as tuberculosis before the age of 40. All of them were putting, whatever capital they had (financial, reputational, sexual) at stake in a gigantic lottery of short term goal-achievement and that would shake the established status hierarchies to the bones.

This can be seen as tragic, but recognition has also always been the means of comedy. It happened that we found ourselves pursuing the path of laughter. To make it lively we worked on interactionability skills that would allow for physical negotiations instead of only the (much more boring) verbal ones. We found artistic expressions for the eros of passing on a glass of water, for loss of sovereignity when a hand touches a breast, for a twosome falling into each other on a sofa so that the sofa breaks, for a fantasy what the two females would do with the candle under the blanket and for a waltz after a one night stand without knowing the other’s name. So, well, it was also not unpoetic.

The students proudly showed their result in two performances in June 2024 and in another two in December 2024. I thank Markus Hippmann from Schauspielschule Wien for the opportunity to do this project and particularly for artistic freedom.

Actors: Eda Bardakci, Paula Cervenka, Valentina Körber, Stefan Krismann, Clemens Lüer, Michael Meier, Andrea Müller, Paul Peham, Katharina Podiwinsky, Kathrin Poinstingl, Lisa Ringhofer, Sarah Schuster, Sandra Stani

Director’s Assistant: Roland Dietz, Pia Lettner