EXTINCTION | 11/10/2024, 19:00 | Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz - Großes Haus (2024)

EXTINCTION takes the bustling artistic and intellectual life in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century forms as starting point, literally transforming it into the ‘merry apocalypse’, to quote the expression coined by Hermann Broch in reference to the European period of carefree abandon that preceded the war. And, indeed, it is the apocalypse, the radical destruction of Western art and civilisation, that Julien Gosselin imagines here. Based on Arthur Schnitzler’s plays and novellas, and the novel Auslöschung by Thomas Bernhard, EXTINCTION contrasts the nobility of Vienna’s elite in their strive for beauty and ideals with the sheer brutality of desire and death. In a mix of concert, live video and radical spoken theatre, the piece explores nihilism and destruction, while following the traces of a buried revolt and the possibility of reinventing the project of modernity.

In a wild mix of party, concert, live film and drama, Julien Gosselin’s three-part piece explores nihilism and destruction as fonts of a lost revolt and opportunity to reinvent the project of modernity. The Austro-Hungarian empire is on the brink of catastrophe with the First World War imminent. Arthur Schnitzler’s ostensible insouciance and the conflicts underlying societal discourses make way for Thomas Bernhard’s radical and spiteful disillusions. The apocalypse is near as western art and civilisation face annihilation. Gosselin chooses Vienna as the place of the blossoming and declining cultural capital full of contradictions in the early days of the twentieth century – the present, when the aristocracy, the empire, the bourgeoisie, industrialisation, Freudian ideas, avant-gardes and artists such as Mahler, Schönberg, Anton von Webern, Alban Berg, Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler held sway, is already the past. Schnitzler’s description of Vienna’s high society oscillating between ignorance, individualism, liberal ideas, democracy, sophistication, violence, misogyny and antisemitism form the matrix for Gosselin’s literary adaptation.

Part One: a party, a DJ set, a fog machine, a dancing audience, and the encounter of two women (Rosa Lembeck and Victoria Quesnel), who might be lovers. An urgent plea to call home. Cut. It is only in the third part of the performance that the background of this scene will be resolved. Rosa is an adaptation of Franz-Josef Murau, who figures in Thomas Bernhard’s novel Extinction – a reflection of the author Bernhard himself.

Part Two: Salon, vestibule, garden party. Gosselin weaves the fabric of his material and his protagonists into a dense, contemporary conversation piece, in which sophisticated dialogue, suppressed violence and sudden bursts of the unconscious are juxtaposed. Like in the lament of Fräulein Else (Zarah Kofler) – an inner monologue in Schnitzler’s play – who gets exasperated with the guilt of her parents’ generation, exemplified by her father’s debts. And yet it is these very debts that tie her to the affluent Nachtigall (Maxence Vandevelde) and the selfish people around her. Schnitzler’s literary universe sets the tone for the Dream Story in which the couple Albertine (Carine Goron) and Florestan (Denis Eyriey) are alienated by their dreams, unfulfilled desire and repressed sexual passions. The motif is taken up again in Aurelie’s character (Victoria Quesnel) from the Comedy of Seduction, whose tabooed love for her brother Falkenir (Guillaume Bachelé) threatens to break her. The garden party, which opens this Schnitzler piece, Vienna’s famous masquerade balls, the bourgeois dinner parties in which the art of conversation is cultivated with a vengeance, they all provide the vibe and sound of Part Two, in which the tragic narratives of the protagonists unfold. This high society teetering on the brink is not aware that they have already been declared dead, and Gosselin confronts them with a catastrophe of cosmic dimensions that only reinforces the desire to negate and repress the thought of loss and the finite nature of life.

Third Part: the film-noirish black-and-white tableau makes way for an intense monologue from Thomas Bernhard’s autobiographical novel Extinction, whose protagonist (Rosa Lembeck) breaks with the past. The triptych is now complete, and the final question is raised: Can rage and vehemence really help to escape the past and path the way to a new future?

The French director is renowned for his visually striking adaptations of great novels from Roberto Bolaño, Michel Houellebecq and Don DeLillo, among others. EXTINCTION is his second production at Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz following STURM UND DRANG [ (premiered 3 June 2022), this time in transnational collaboration with the collective theatre group Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur, which he founded in 2009 together with fellow artists, including actors. EXTINCTION is the second part of Gosselin’s artistic experiment of appropriating German literature and history, with texts by Thomas Bernhard, Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Rehearsals took place in Berlin Rummelsburg and in Calais, France. EXTINCTION will see its world premiere in Montpellier on June 2, 2023, with follow-up performances at the Festival d’Avignon and the Wiener Festwochen. In September 2023, the piece will open the new season of Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.

In French and German with German, French and English subtitles

Duration: approx. 5 hours, incl. 2 breaks

Attention! Stroboscopic effects in use in the 1st part