“Lay Down Your Arms” at Schauspielhaus Graz: Suttner Lives

137 years after Bertha von Suttner's novel, Schauspielhaus Graz brings ‘Lay Down Your Arms’ to the stage. Sandra Strunz and a phenomenal ensemble deliver an evening poised between bitter gravity and liberating laughter.

Published in 1889, the novel tells the life story of Countess Martha Althaus, who has to fear for her loved ones through four wars. Out of her personal experience grows an unsparing indictment of war and militarism, mirroring the author's own commitment to actively campaigning for peace. The book became a bestseller and was translated into numerous languages within a short time.

The stage adaptation by Sandra Strunz and Anna-Sophia Güther offers the audience a highly emotional evening without kitsch, without signs of age and without any updating forced through come what may.

In the feudal social fabric of the 19th century, it was considered sacrilege to criticise warmongering, misconceived expansionist policies or the lack of medical assistance on the battlefields even in the slightest. The system of ennoblements built up over centuries, granting privileges in exchange for a personal blood toll in the wars, formed the backbone of aristocratic defence and attack policy until general, binding military conscription was introduced.

When Countess Martha Althaus, married name von Dotzky, loses her husband in the war shortly after the birth of her first son, she begins to question this system. Marielle Layher sparkles in this role in every shade it has to offer. In doing so she has to defend herself fiercely against her reactionary sister – Annette Holzmann – and her war-hungry father – Anna Rausch. In the case of her sister, one still witnesses how torn her heart is. This is suggested by tiny scraps of paper that she pulls from her décolletage and tears up violently, emitting short, shrill cries of pain. Her father is quite another matter: apart from an increasing crankiness of old age, there is not the slightest sign in him of condemning wars in any form whatsoever.

The acting is deeply impressive, because every single emotional stirring – deeply felt grief, fear, hope, malice, but also stubbornness and the tics of old age – is portrayed with unbelievable authenticity. By each and every one of them, quite simply by all who stand on that stage.

Marielle Layher, Anna Rausch, Annette Holzmann, Dominik Puhl, Željko Marovic, Luisa Schwab and Mario Lopatta, some of them in double roles, are one hundred per cent present in every one of their appearances. They are supported by a creative direction that deploys the characters and lets them speak with a finger on the pulse of our time, yet never transposes the action into the present.

Nevertheless, the central message remains topical: war is terrible and should long since have become a thing of the past.

Sabine Kohlstedt, responsible for both the set and the costumes, has designed an area made of boards with a steel structure in the middle of the stage, in front of which a large crystal chandelier dangles at times. This allows for swift changes between the ancestral seat of the Counts Althaus and the battlefield, which remains ever present. The costumes feature fashion references to the 19th century, yet are spiced up with a flair of the contemporary zeitgeist.

The production offers up some extraordinarily moving scenes. One of them has the entire ensemble strike up a ‘music of groans’ in which you feel just how dreadful that waiting is when you are waiting for a sign of life from your loved ones. Notifications of death reaching the families via army post, or the loss of the second-born child at birth – never realistic, yet visualised so clearly that no doubt arises as to what is being shown – are equally part of it.

The course of the narrative is supported by choreographic interludes, all the way to a ballet of gestures suggesting an aristocratic tea hour conducted according to strict ceremonial. Rainer Süßmilch's musical setting underpins fervent advocacy of war with rousing brass band bluster, but also with lyrical vocal numbers intended to plant the heroisation of the fallen soldiers in people's hearts.

As deeply dramatic as many scenes are – such as the one bathed in darkness in which Martha learns of the accounts of the fighting and its atrocities for the soldiers – others are just as full of wit. The way the widowed countess and her second husband Friedrich Tilling find their way to one another is staged most deliciously. The shy suitor finally wins his bride only on her express command. When the two soon afterwards take their greatest adversary – Martha's father, General Althaus – for a ride, quite literally on a swing, the audience is allowed to recover a little from the prevailing seriousness of the subject with hearty laughter. Situated somewhere between humour and bitter gravity, in turn, is an educational scene in which the old Count Althaus instructs his grandson in hard-boiled behaviour. Kicking lapdogs and abusing them as the enemy is punishable as cruelty to animals today, but it was always a tried-and-tested means of turning young people into empathy-free monsters later on.

The direction, positioned between brilliant, human portrayals of emotion and abstractly rendered spaces or events, pulls off this balancing act with flying colours. Sandra Strunz thus demonstrates in exemplary fashion what theatre can do today. Above all, however, she proves that it remains an unsurpassed medium: one for which it is worth leaving your own comfort zone and heading into an auditorium together with hundreds of others.

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