15 March 1938, Heldenplatz: the Viennese cheer Hitler, who just invaded Austria. Professor Schuster, a sophisticated music lover, at once a tyrant and a rebel, flees to Oxford. Ten years later, he comes back, “for love of music.” But his wife Hedwig, haunted by the enthusiasm with which her country welcomed its own occupation, convinces him to go back to England. The day before they are to leave, with their trunks already shut and the precious Bösendorfer piano already on its way to Oxford, Schuster kills himself in the middle of the Heroes' Square... Written in the middle of the Kurt Waldheim Affair, when Austria elected a Prime Minister with a murky Nazi past, and dealing with the question of the Anschluß in vehement, almost brutal prose, Heldenplatz caused a political scandal even before the text was played or published in 1989. After Woodcutters, unanimously celebrated last year, the Polish director and the actors of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre are now working on Thomas Bernhard's final provocation, the last play in his “theatre of irritation” which seeks “the part of truth that exists in every lie.” Together, they explore the possibilities of a time suspended between the world of the living and the world of the dead, in a fascinating relationship to the persistence of thought.
