His theater play was, as Otto Schenk once put it, a “cheerful detour” to endure life. The Austrian actor died at the age of 94.
Otto Schenk developed his very own form of comedy.
Imago
He didn’t like to describe himself as a funny person, but Otto Schenk saw himself as a “craftsman of humor”. With his choice of characters, the “theater player” (as he defines himself) demonstrated a sympathy for the little ones, the servants of this world.
NZZ.ch requires JavaScript for important functions. Your browser or ad blocker is currently preventing this.
Please adjust the settings.
His one-person play “The Star Hours of Josef Bieder” made this clear: Bieder, a prop master, suddenly finds himself faced with a full house on what was supposed to be a closing day. Instead of sending the audience home, he entertained them with anecdotes from theater life and with his tragicomic ballet performance as the dying swan.
-Fine art of fooling around
Schenk was born on June 12, 1930 in Vienna as the son of a Jewish notary and initially studied law. Blessed with his father’s comic talent and encouraged by him to act, Otto Schenk soon left law behind and completed training at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. As an actor, he quickly conquered the boards of the Vienna Volkstheater, the Theater in der Josefstadt, which he also directed for several years, and the Viennese cabaret institution Simpl. He also impressed in numerous film roles.
His comedic acting was, as he once put it himself, a “cheerful detour” to endure life. The actor has developed his very own form of comedy. His delivery, rich in nuances and retarded moments, his expressive facial expressions and waving gestures were paired with punchy wordplay. He excelled in the fine art of fooling around, parody and clownish grotesqueness. But as clowns tend to do, their infantile jokes are often just the comical underbelly of their tragic, finite existence.
Parody of a soup commercial
Schenk’s artful play with misplacement, his fun in exaggerating form and breaking the norm exposed human weaknesses. But it never left the audience disenchanted, but rather relieved. Whether he was parodying the directors’ guild or a soup commercial, whether he was reciting Tucholsky and Polgar, telling jokes and theater stories – or overturning the world of reason with his congenial partners Helmuth Lohner and Alfred Böhm: he always knew how to explore the comic heights in all their nuances. Sometimes his nonsense could also end in anarchic destruction: for example in his role as a Japanese hi-fi expert who directs the installation of a stereo system and in the process causes the customer’s sweet home – one automatically thinks of Loriot – to collapse.
From 1957 onwards, Schenk brought his unerring sense of theater and extensive stage experience to countless opera productions at leading international theaters. In Vienna, Hamburg and Munich, among others, he created interpretations of the major repertoire pieces that were long seen as defining styles. However, his readings, which were always developed from the works themselves, increasingly contradicted the emerging trend of directing theater, which misunderstood faithfulness to the text as retrograde. However, it is precisely this that has made some of his productions, such as his Munich “Rosenkavalier” or the “Ring” cycle at the New York Met, become legends. On January 9th, Otto Schenk, who only retired from the stage in 2021, died at the age of 94.
