A table, a chair, a bottle. And a glass of wine, which a waiter is serving to a guest. That is how it starts. But who is serving who? Or who is serving whom? Who will foot the bill at the end of the day? Who will up the ante? In the work of British author and director Tim Etchells, which he originally developed with Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas in Avignon, power dynamics are played out both acerbically and humorously in countless variations of the same scene. With a table, chair and bottle, the Free Republic of Vienna, in cooperation with the Volkstheater in den Bezirken, is inviting audiences in all 23 districts of Vienna to see the slapstick comedy during spring and autumn, from Tschauner Bühne in Ottakring to the football club in Floridsdorf. Join us – after all, everyone has to deal with power, and that can be a nightmare or insanely funny.
19 May – 23 June at 15 venues at the disctricts German approx. 70 min
Direction Tim Etchells Text Tim Etchells, Bertrand Lesca, Nasi Voutsas With Frank Genser, Christoph Schüchner Collaboration direction German version Johanna Mitulla Assistant director Birgit Allesch Stage management Pia-Maria Harr Translation Astrid Sommer Music Graeme Miller Stage design Richard Lowdon Light design Alex Fernandes
Production original version Festival d’Avignon Coproduction Original Version GRRRANIT Scène nationale de Belfort, Centre culturel André Malraux Scène nationale de Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, Théâtre de la Manufacture CDN Nancy Lorraine, CCAS les activités sociales de l’énergie, le Théâtre Silvia Monfort (Paris), La Vignette Scène conventionnée Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier), Théâtre du Bois de l’Aune (Aix-en-Provence), Théâtre de Choisy-le-Roi Scène conventionnée d’intérêt national art et création pour la diversité linguistique, Théâtre Alibi (Bastia), The Coronet Theatre (London) Residencies original version Centre social Espace Plu riel-salle de la Barbière (Avignon), The Coronet Theatre (London), Battersea Arts Centre (London), Toynbee St udios ( London) The German language version is a joint project of Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien and Volkstheater in den Bezirken
executed by the team of the Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien and the team of Volkstheater
Premiere (L’Addition) July 2023, Festival d’Avignon Premiere German language version (Die Rechnung) May 2024, Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien
Die Rechnung / L’Addition by Tim Etchells marks the start of the Volksstück / Pièce Commune series, which the Free Republic of Vienna produces together with the Festival d’Avignon: touring plays with a maximum of two actors and hardly any technology, staged by a different artist each year and performed in community centers, on soccer pitches, openair stages etc. Popular theatre at the highest level, world theatre for everyone.
TIM ETCHELLS IN CONVERSATION
L’Addition is a project you developed together with the British-French performance duo Bert & Nasi for Festival d’Avignon. One year on, Die Rechnung is the German adaptation of the piece, restaged with Volkstheater Wien actors. Can you describe the process of developing the piece and talk about how the play evolved through the new version?
Tim Etchells I met Bert and Nasi some years back. I saw their performance Palmyra, and was very impressed. In 2020, they received the Forced Entertainment Award, intended to help younger artists developing their practice and the context for it. So we had a dialogue already through that process. For Festival d’Avignon, I thought of them right away, and asked them to join my project which began from a very simple idea, a few lines of text and the sketch of a situation. We worked as I always do and very much through improvisation -setting up sessions that I guided in a very organic way. Bert & Nasi excel in this approach, which made the first part of the process very playful and open. As usual though there was a shift in approach as we went along –we took the improvised material and hammered it into a script, a score, a choreography. So, it was a mixture – a lot of freedom to start with and then a lot of nailing things down! Once you’ve done that – on the other side of the hard mechanical fixing process, the fun can start all over again.
The work to make a new version for Vienna began from the script (in translation by Astrid Sommer) and the score, basically drawing on video from previous performances. Me, Frank Genser and Christoph Schüchner (the actors from Volkstheater) and Johanna Mitulla, who works with me on direction, jumped right in trying to fix all the mechanics … getting the text and the structure in place. It’s hard work but once we have done that the more playful exploration
begins. Chris and Frank are great performers and they bring their own intelligence and energy to the work. It’s also super interesting to me how the language shift changes things – I’m working on the piece in English, French and German now … and the transformations are fascinating. What I’m enjoying now is that I’m asking Frank and Chris to follow their instincts, finding ways to go with a new articulation of a moment or a scene in the piece. It’s slowly becoming its own thing, which is really important, even as it leans strongly on the architecture and text we made before.
From a very ordinary situation (a waiter/a customer), the story quickly spins out of control. Meaning comes in waves, and the performance turns out to be much more complex than it seems …
I like to make performance that explores many possible alternative versions or understandings of a single event or situation. So instead of one story – a drama – we get something multiple, kaleidoscopic, a set of layers that are open to many different readings and interpretations. The idea is to heighten and amplify a scene or a situation, and to turn it into something that might be funny and tragic at the same time. It’s an approach that comes from my desire to dig deep and to examine things; even a trivial starting point can be explored in thousands of different ways.
L’Addition is based on a very simple scenario –more or less a staple of old jokes and slapstick comedy – a scene with a waiter and a customer. As we explore it in the performance, it quickly becomes clear that the material is focused on this relationship of power. Who waits on who? Who is in control? The power relationship between the protagonists turns into a fierce but playful struggle, in an atmosphere of instability. In the performance I want to see how this relationship can be subverted, inverted, how we
can play with and transform it. I rarely choose explicitly political subjects, but I always hope that the work we do will become a means to help us understand the outside world. Even if they don’t find their source in the political, performances are always a reflection of the political. The performance questions society itself, beyond the rehearsal studio or the theatre venue.
The performance can surprise you and circumvent your defenses. One moment it’s very funny and light, and suddenly it becomes very serious and dramatic. Or vice versa. You have to keep your guard up and sharpen your mind: I really like that. At the heart of every creation there is the desire to take the audience on a journey they would never have imagined, in terms of images, ideas, reactions and questions.
Words often dictate the rules of your performances, which are nevertheless sometimes wordless. How did you tackle the question of language, of words and of their value in this show?
As a writer, words are important to me of course. I always try to be precise, to articulate language in an entertaining and subversive way. As a director though, I’m also very sensitive to all the other elements of theatre, like energy, temporality, movement, and the way words can be embodied by the performers. Spoken text is one layer of a performance but it’s one layer amongst others – I like to use spoken language but also to question its grip on the events in front of us. Language is a material, it’s not everything and it’s not there to explain things.
In theatrical performances I work a lot with action and energy excitement – on stage everyone speaks, everyone runs. I love to create chaos and L’Addition often uses this approach. It’s too fast, too loud! But I think it’s always fascinating
when things come to a halt in the middle of it all, when everything goes quiet, no more talking, no more action. I try to keep in mind a balance between the exhilarating flow of too-much-information and these moments of emptiness, where nothing happens. From this “nothing” incredibly rich material emerges, if it comes at the right time. The goal is to create moments when the audience fills the void – silence and stillness –with their own imagination, to create moments of introspection. Silence plays an integral part.
After working as a British artist in France and Vienna on a piece that strongly engages the audience’s sense of humour, what are your observations on humour in different cultural contexts? How much is humour universal, how much is it local?
Everywhere has its own codes, its rituals of politeness, rituals of service and customer behaviour. And humour comes often in the breaking of those codes. Shifting context internationally, the flavour of things changes a little – the flavour of outrage changes, the glee and energy of disobedience or mayhem changes …. I’ve certainly enjoyed exploring these shifts. The glee of mayhem – of breaking rules – is an international language.
Tim Etchells is a British artist and writer whose work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. He won international fame as the leader of the Sheffield-based performance group Forced Entertainment. Moreover, his work outside this context has been exhibited numerous times by prestigious institutions worldwide and comprises collaborations with distinguished artists from a variety of disciplines, including Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Marino Formenti, Taus Mahakacheva, Vlatka Horvat and Elmgreen & Dragset. In 2016, the Forced Entertainment ensemble was awarded the International Ibsen Award for its groundbreaking contribution to contemporary theatre and performance. A collection of short fiction by Tim Etchells, Endland, was published in 2019. Forced Entertainment and Tim Etchells have performed several times at Wiener Festwochen, most recently in 2013 in the context of the festival parcours Unruhe der Form and in 2021, together with violinist Aisha Orazbayeva, with the production Heartbraking Final. In 2024, in addition to Die Rechnung, he will also be showing How Goes the World, part of the Histoire(s) du Théâtre by NTGent.
PUBLICATION DETAILS Owner, Editor and Publisher Wiener Festwochen GesmbH, Lehárgasse 11/1/6, 1060 Wien P + 43 1 589 22 0, festwochen@festwochen.at | www.festwochen.at General Management Milo Rau, Artemis Vakianis Artistic Direction (responsible for content) Milo Rau (Artistic Director) Text credits Based on an interview conducted by Malika Baaziz for the 77th edition of Festival d’Avignon and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. The interview was reworked, abridged and adapted for the Viennese context. Picture credit Cover: © Christophe Raynaud de Lage Produced by Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH (Bad Vöslau)
Main sponsors
Project sponsor Die Rechnung at CAPE 10
Funding bodies
Presenting partner Die Rechnung
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