«Шаги / Steps» Журнал Школы актуальных гуманитарных исследований

SHAGI/STEPS 5(4)

Ключевые слова: modernist theatre, gender, cabaret, Gertrud Eysoldt, Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Аннотация: The aim of the text is to analyze Gertrud Eysoldt’s role in the formation of Max Reinhardt’s theatre. His cabaret “Schall und Rauch” emerged from a kind of “men’s club” (1901), but in the first productions of the theatre which was born out of this cabaret (plays by Strindberg, Wilde, Wedekind and Hofmannsthal) the female element dominated, and was embodied by Eysoldt. However, reviewers mainly stressed the corporeal weakness of her heroines and their incompatibility with the norms of “mature femininity”. Isn’t this the cause of Eysoldt’s closeness to Reinhardt’s project? After all, his cabaret also presents “a performance of weakness”. In cabaret, a literary text ceases to be treated as material for “an ideal realization”; instead, it becomes the material for a theatrical game that often is based on overturning expectations. This “performance of weakness” empowers Eysoldt (previously “destined” to play naïve heroines or breeches roles) to play such characters as Salome or Lulu, with her intellectualism overcoming the dominant assumption that these roles were created to display seductiveness of female flesh.
The performance of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (1903) represents an important turning point. Beginning with a sort of „rehabilitation” of such contemporary authors as Strindberg and Wedekind (which paradoxically didn’t mean their glorification, but rather a polemical dialogue), in Elektra the theatre claims its right also to challenge classical antiquity and to unfold its own meanings through a sharp contrast to that image of antiquity which a tradition and previous theatrical experience dictated to the audience.

Acknowledgements. The Research Project «Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Female Performers of His Work» is supported by Austrian Science Fund (grant M2330-G30).

Для цитирования: Jakubova, N. (2019). Cabaret as laboratory of director-centered theatre? The case of Reinhardt’s circle: Gendered perspective. From “Schall und Rauch” to Elektra by Hofmannsthal. Shagi/Steps, 5(4), 132–148. (In Russian). DOI: 10.22394/2412-9410-2019-