Page - 83 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

83 Lazarus’s necropolitical afterlife Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf, with its Austrian one following on May 9, 2018 in Vienna’s Volks theater.3 Unlike the New York and London productions, in both of which Dexter star Michael C. Hall played Newton and which were “exact replicas” of Bowie’s vision,4 the only thing the Ger- man-language productions have in common is that they are based on Torberg’s translation. Otherwise, each is entirely its own entity, featuring its own concept, direction, and cast.5 As the reading in this chapter reveals, the Viennese Lazarus, di- rected by Miloš Lolić and with an almost unrecognizably youth- ful Günter Franzmeier as Newton, radically distinguishes itself from both the Anglophone original and its Germanophone counterparts, as is appropriate to its place of performance. Vienna’s Volks theater was co-founded in 1889 by the writer Ludwig Anzensgruber and the industrialist Felix Fischer with the explicitly counterhegemonic mission of providing alterna- tive offerings to both the imperial and music-oriented com- mercial theaters. After tracing the Volks theater’s history as a revolutionary place for “the people,” I turn in this chapter to the colorfully postmodernist yet deadly serious distinctiveness 3 Further premiers followed on June 9, 2018 in the Theater am Goetheplatz in Bremen, September 27, 2018 in the Großer Saal Musiktheater in Linz, November 17, 2018 in the SchauSpielHaus Hamburg, February 2, 2019 at the Staatstheater Nürnberg, May 18, 2019 in the Theater Bielefeld, June 6, 2019 in the Schauspielhaus Leipzig, and June 15, 2019 in the Deutsches Theater Göttingen. It also began to spread both within and outside Europe, with the Norwegian premier in Oslo on May 11, 2019, an Anglophone stint at the Arts Centre in Melbourne from May 18 to June 9, 2019, the Danish premier at the gala opening of the Aarhus Festuge summer festival on Au- gust 30, 2019, and the Dutch premiere on October 13, 2019 at the DeLaMar Theater in Amsterdam. At the time of writing, more German productions are set to open at the Kampa-Halle Minden on March 31, 2020 and the Musik- und Kongresshalle Lübeck on April 1, 2020. 4 Producer Robert Fox claimed that “‘[i]t’s absolutely as he wanted it. It’s absolutely as he saw it, […]. What we did in London was an exact replica of what he saw, and what he approved. We wouldn’t change that’” (von Aue 2018). 5 The director of the Melbourne production, Michael Kantor, boasted in a similar spirit that “[t]his isn’t some pre-made production we bought off the shelf from New York, like The Lion King” (Lallo 2019).