Was ihr wollt (What You Will) by Tiroler Landestheater (review)

Reviewed by: Was ihr wollt (What You Will) by Tiroler Landestheater Anja Hartl Was ihr wollt (What You Will) Presented by the Tiroler Landestheater, Innsbruck. Directed by Anne Mulleners. Translated by Erich Fried. Set design by Vibeke Andersen. Costume design by Chani Lehmann. Lighting design by Michael Reinisch. Music by Hansjörg Sofka. Choreography by Sindy Sinful and Andrea De Majo. Dramaturgical assistance by Diana Merkel and Elisabeth Schack. With Tommy Fischnaller-Wachtler (Viola, formerly Sebastian), Pasquale di Filippo (Orsino), Julia Posch (Olivia), Sara Nunius (Malvolia), Petra Alexandra Pippan (Antonio/Narr), Stefan Riedl (Sir Toby Rülps), Florian Granzner (Sir Andrew von Bleichenwang), and Ulrike Lasta (Maria). On the back cover of the program for Was ihr wollt at the Tiroler Landestheater in Innsbruck, Austria, there is a quote by trans performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon that captures the essence of director Anne Mulleners's groundbreaking adaptation of Twelfth Night: "No one is coming to rescue you. This is not a tragedy, it's an opportunity. Become the person you were waiting for." These powerful words set the tone for this production, which reconsidered the play through the lens of contemporary gender and queer theory. Probing Twelfth Night's queer potential, Mulleners turned the relationship between the twins into an internal conflict: the feared loss of a sibling was transformed into a quest for identity as Viola was reimagined as a trans figure who was formerly known as Sebastian. Through this radical reinterpretation, Mulleners's version was outstanding in its attempt to break away from established categories of gender and sexual identity, and [End Page 79] Click for larger view View full resolution Viola, formerly Sebastian (Tommy Fischnaller-Wachtler) and Olivia (Julia Posch) in Was ihr wollt, dir. Anne Mulleners. Tiroler Landestheater, 2023. Photo by Birgit Gufler, courtesy of Tiroler Landestheater. [End Page 80] to explore the implications of this transgressive approach both within the fictional world of the play and beyond. The production made this queer reading of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night explicit through the use of intertextual borrowings: by enriching the Shakespearean text with excerpts from contemporary writings, Mulleners created a dialogue between early modern and twenty-first-century conceptions of gender. Even though the Shakespearean text was considerably cut and transformed as a result, the citations offered valuable additions to the production. The most important source was Spanish transgender writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado's An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (2020), a collection of essays in which Preciado documents their transition. Throughout Was ihr wollt, Mulleners inserted excerpts from Preciado's book to highlight the production's interrogation of gender norms. In addition, the production combined different languages: besides German, the characters also sometimes spoke English and, in Orsino's case, Italian, thereby adding to the intricacy of the relations between the characters. This palimpsestic approach did not so much alienate or diminish Shakespeare's play, however, as draw attention to its potency for contemporary investigations into gender concerns. During the surreal, dreamlike beginning of the show, for example, Viola walked down the auditorium towards the stage, where a video projection onto a transparent curtain that served as a screen confronted Viola with her former identity as Sebastian. This juxtaposition between the physical Viola and the projected Sebastian introduced audiences to the production's radical shift in interpretation: that Viola and Sebastian were the same person. Choosing to begin the play with Viola and Sebastian rather than with Orsino's famous speech, the production foregrounded Twelfth Night's interrogation of sexual and gender identity. In the prerecorded film, Sebastian cited Preciado to reflect on his feeling of inbetweenness: "I am in transition. I am in the waiting room between two mutually exclusive systems of representation" (173). Later, Viola quoted Preciado again to describe her "trans condition" as "a new form of Uranism. I am not a man and I am not a woman and I am not heterosexual I am not homosexual I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the sex-gender system. […] I am a Uranian confined inside the limits of techno-scientific capitalism" (29). Preciado draws on Karl Heinrich Ulrich's concept of Uranism, which envisions the planet Uranus...