When Thomas Bernhard died in 1989, one year after the opening of this play had been greeted by journalistic attacks and public outrage, his will blocked his theatrical works from being produced or published within the Austrian borders. And yet in apparent contrast with this extreme choice, it is possible that Bernhard had anticipated, and perhaps even encouraged, the reactions elicited by Heldenplatz: it was maybe him, maybe his friend Klaus Peymann (also the director of the Burgtheater, where the play was being staged), or maybe his publisher Suhrkamp, who leaked some carefully chosen lines from this damning, painful text to the press in the days before the opening. Once the text was actually circulated (a full 24 hours after the first night), popular rage at Bernhard’s attack against his own country was such that he was even assaulted in the street.

Meredith Oakes and Andrea Tierney’s new translation of Heldenplatz, directed by Annie Castledine and Annabel Arden at the Arcola, makes it obvious to see why the play was found so upsetting. We begin in a flat that faces the famous Heldenplatz in Vienna, in 1988, where an older and a younger housekeeper are nervously tiptoeing around the recent suicide of their Jewish home owner, Professor Schuster, while ironing his white shirts and polishing his shoes, and emptying the suitcases he had prepared for a trip to Oxford that will now never take place. The not-too-subtle symbolism of the suitcases is made more unequivocal by the directors’ choice to have all the other characters wait for their turn at the outskirts of the scene, dressed in black 1940s clothes on which are stitched bright, obedient yellow stars of David (later on, a character will reinforce the connection by saying, with apparent nonchalance: ‘The sight of luggage has always been terrible to me’).

As the housekeepers discuss the Professor’s personality and temper, two fundamental things emerge. The first one is a somehow typical, unspeakable undercurrent of tension, cruelty and sadism, that same feeling of glass shards lying just underneath the surface that one gets when reading Elfriede Jelinek’s novels. In this psychologically violent context, Barbara Marten as Frau Zittel, her bright blue eyes shining icily from her mourning outfit, is as frighteningly controlling and submitted as you can possibly wish her to be. The second thing made clear during the first few minutes of the play is that the Professor jumped out of a window because of his discouragement and desperation at the state of his country, a state that reminded him of the year which made Heldenplatz famous in history: 1938, when Hitler was cheered enthusiastically by the Austrian population as he entered the square. These same loud cheers are still being heard fifty years later by the Professor’s wife, in regular fits that overtake her since they moved back from Oxford, where they had escaped during the war, to this particular flat in Vienna.

In Berhnard’s falsely lulling theatrical style, we are rocked rhythmically back to recurring considerations over the new, fresh rise of antisemitism in Austria throughout the rest of evening, each line bringing us nearer to the center of the spiral, until we are so close and the noise is so loud and the violence so incandescently bright that we can barely control our pulse. It is uncle Robert, the Professor’s brother, who, in spite of his resignation, delivers the most scalding condemnations against the Austrians, during a long and foggy scene at a cemetery, as he sits white-faced but gentlemanly with his two nieces: ‘The Viennese are Jewhaters and will remain Jewhaters to all eternity’; ‘this Austrian stupidity is utterly repulsive’; Austrians are nothing else but ‘six and half million feeble-minded raving mad people/screaming incessantly at the top of their voices for a director’ - and the director, who had already come once, will come again and ‘give them the final push down the abyss’.

The black and white rigor of Iona McLeish’s set, the clock ticking louder and louder, the cacophony of moods during a family dinner of dissonant dialogues and geometrically angled cutlery, they all turn the screws tighter and tighter. Yet the atmosphere remains reasonably civilised - until, that, is we first hear those cheers ourselves, the hysterical chanting to Hitler,  and then they seem so wildly unexpected and yet so obviously anticipated that it is hard, if not impossible, not to find them profoundly affecting and upsetting. And one can understand why this would be a deeply uncomfortable truth to be told about ourselves, for any of us whose grandparents might have been complicit of the cheering, and again here and now, at a time when in the aftermath of a recession, hatred is once again raising its head.

Till 6 March 2010