Selbstbezichtigung - schedule, program & buy tickets

A production of the Volkstheater Wien, adapted from the Berliner Ensemble

Peter Handke’s SELBSTBEZICHTIGUNG, which premiered in 1966, represents, in a sense, a complementary counterpart to the earlier PUBLIKUMSBESCHIMPFUNG: The audience is not attacked, but rather elevated to the highest authority, as if it were a court or a god. “Postulates, principles, labels, statutes, general opinions, and formulas” (Peter Handke) form prescriptive rules that seem inevitable to violate. As if following the motto “Whoever lives causes a disturbance,” the text demonstrates the mistakes that accompany every life’s journey. Whereas Handke attempts not to attribute culpable behavior to personal weaknesses, Dušan David Pařízek takes the opposite approach: he makes the impersonal personal again. Following its premiere at Volx/Margareten in 2015 and its transfer to the Berliner Ensemble, this successful production is now returning to Vienna.

Subject to change.