Tales From The Vienna Woods

 The short-lived Odon von Horvath (1901-38) wrote this, his best known and most admired play, in 1931, and for it he received the Kleist Prize. Consciously building on the Austro-German "folk play" tradition, he sought to portray the pervading mediocrity and venality of the lower middle class. Some twenty characters people the highly episodic fifteen scenes of this work. A young girl turns away from her fiance to take up with a wastrel by whom she has a child. Her father refuses to help, the lover skips away, and she entrusts the baby to the lover's grandmother. She becomes a nightclub stripper and is convicted of thievery. On her release, she finds the grandmother has killed the child. In defeat, she returns to her original bestial fiance to the strains of the titular Strauss waltz. This production marks the premiere of Carl Mueller's blunt translation ("The world can go fuck itself"). In the middle, director Neil has used Strauss' "Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka" for a company dance, and near the end we get "Deutschland uber alles" and Kurt Weill's "Surabaya Johnny." But the anachronistic appearance of Bernstein's "New York, New York" is strange, to say the least. The entire cast is drawn from the graduating class of the London Academy of Performing Arts, so the level of acting is far from imposing.