Page - 91 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

91 Lazarus’s necropolitical afterlife In conceptualizing an appropriate space between life and death for the Volks theater’s staging of Lazarus, set designer Wolfgang Menardi let himself be inspired by the taxidermied specimens in the nearby Natural History Museum and created a psychedelic menagerie to house his hallucinating hero. Instead of anything recognizably rocket-like, a form that featured prom- inently in the Anglo-American, Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg stagings, Menardi designed a towering contraption of asymmetrical, glass cases and placed it at the center of a double revolving stage. Around it were a number of spaced-apart, up- right screens and mirrors capable of revolving and refracting light so that the stage glowed in the colors of the rainbow as its middle revolved in one direction, its outside in the other, and its reflective contents all on their own. The staging thus conceptu- ally mirrored Newton’s confused state, while affording him, and the others in the cast, the possibility of stepping off the revolving stage and having a respite from the maelstrom. In littering the stage with specimens of exotic animals — a polar bear, moose, sheep, monkey, seal, turtle, ostrich, snakes, and some unidenti- fiable birds, along with a large swordfish loomingly suspended overhead to complete the effect — the production emphasized the play’s concentration on life and death. The radiant neon of the costumes and lighting pulsed with vital, life-giving forces, amplifying the energy of the music, while the taxidermied ani- mals gazed out at the audience with their dead eyes, reproach- fully posing the question of who had had the right to take their life. More forcefully than either the Linz production’s choice of a morgue setting, Nuremberg’s of a railway station waiting room, Leipzig’s deconstructed cabaret, Bielefeld’s abstract hos- pital-bed constructions, Bremen’s even more abstract rising and falling black stairs, or Göttingen’s tinselly, water-logged cocktail lounge, the Vienna production drew attention not to the transi- tory nature of life and the desirability of carpe noctem but to the actual, physical taking of it. That the play’s central theme is not dying, but killing can be seen in the character of Valentine. This “mass murderer” (Bowie and Walsh 2017, viii) comes from the fourth cut on The Next