Böse Buben / Fiese Männer
Director: Ulrich Seidl
Based on: David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Cast: Georg Friedrich, Wolfgang Pregler, Lars Rudolph, René Rupnik, Nabil Saleh, Michael Thomas, Michael Tregor
Part of: Wiener Festwochen

Plot:
A bleak cellar. Seven men meet there. They exercise, they talk – less to each other than about themselves, slowly opening up more about their very private concerns, their obsessions, their fantasies and also revealing the very seedy underbelly of the (Austrian?) male.

This whole productions is very mixed. There are moments that are really fantastic, but more often than not it ends in drudgery. Especially whenever they depart from the original David Foster Wallace texts.

The play is almost three hours long, without any intermission and that was way too long for me. Especially because Seidl has a rather rigid structure that switches between the monologues and various weird group activities (from exercising to singing (nazi) songs. As the play stretches on, I started counting who already had their monologue and who was yet to come and to calculate how long everything would take – never a good sign.

There were moments in this production where the play was almost like I hoped it would be. When Georg Friedrich does his bondage monologue that is equally funny and uncomfortable and thought-provoking. [Though the original is more serious, I also very much liked this version of it.] When Michael Thomas does his monologue, it absolutely had me in stitches – even more so than the original. Michael Tregor was also really good with his short monologue. Wolfgang Pregler – who does the same part as Dominic Cooper in the movie version – isn’t quite as captivating as Cooper and personally I wouldn’t have ended the play with him, but it was still a very good moment.

But the monologues that were added really didn’t work for me. While Nabil Saleh and his very sharp satire of how oriental immigrants are seen in Austria were at least sometimes funny (though it went on too long), René Rupnik’s monologue about pussies and how he would like to sleep with his aunt and suck her tits really was what killed the play for me. It was obviously an attempt to gross out the audience but it was just extremely obnoxious. It happens early on in the play and I have to admit that I spent the rest of the play in fear that he would start talking again.

The mix between Wallace and not-Wallace just emphasises Wallace’s talent as the other things just couldn’t keep up. And it doesn’t help that Seidl just keeps on piling stuff (like xenophobia and nazi slogans) on top of the already loaded monologues. It just becomes too much.

Summarising: Many people left the play somewhere inbetween. I sympathize.