Salzburg State Theater

This guide to the Salzburg State Theater opens with a question: who would risk actors' safety and his own career for a stretch of total darkness on stage? In July nineteen seventy-two, the answer was a young director named Claus Peymann, staging the world premiere of a Thomas Bernhard play, who wanted its closing scene played in blackness against an eighteen eighty-four fire safety rule requiring emergency lighting through every performance. At the dress rehearsal, someone switched those lights off anyway, and the scene landed exactly as Peymann had imagined it. You are standing in front of the same Fellner and Helmer facade those actors walked through, raised in eighteen ninety-three.