a good night out

First Joseph Fritzl, family man, and now this.

An actor slit his throat on stage when the prop knife for his suicide scene turned out to be a real one.

Daniel Hoevels, 30, slumped over with blood pouring from his neck while the audience broke into applause at the "special effect". Police are investigating whether the knife was a mistake or a murder plot. They are questioning the rest of the cast, and backstage hands with access to props; they will also carry out DNA tests.

Things went wrong at Vienna's Burgtheater as Hoevels' character went to "kill himself" in the final scene of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart, about Mary Queen of Scots, on Saturday night It was only when he did not get up to take a bow that anyone realised something had gone wrong.

Austria: the home of the gothic. Mind you…

Tragedy was the staple of the German theatre…their tragedies were obsessively focused on mankind’s cruelty to man, on his bent towards self-destruction and on death. Death by murder, suicide or by some more esoteric form resolved nearly all German drama of the late 19th century and 1900s. In Gerhard Hauptmann’s Hannele, the child heroine dies of neglect and abuse in an almshouse, in his Sunken Bell, Heinrich’s wife drowns herself in a lake and he drinks a poisoned goblet, in Rose Bernd, the title character, seduced and deserted, strangles her newborn child, in Henschel, the title character hangs himself after betraying his wife by marrying a tart who lets his child die of neglect, in Michael Kramer a sensitive son is driven to suicide by an overbearing father…In Wedekind’s Fruhlings Erwachen, the discovery of sex by adolescents leads to total catastrophe: the fourteen year old heroine dies of a mismanaged abortion; the boy is expelled from school and sent to a reformatory by his parents; his friend, unable to bear life, commits suicide and reappears in a graveyard with his head under his arm in a closing scene of opaque symbolism.

From Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower. So, you see, slitting your throat is a bit of an occupational hazard for actors in German theatre. It’s a wonder the audience didn’t join in.

Comments

[ajay]

I would guess suicide. It's not easy to imagine that you wouldn't notice the difference between a prop knife and a real knife when you are actually cutting into your own skin with it.

[Alex]

Fritzl was a throwforward from the mid-century; DIY Nazism. This is from further back, and hugely bound to place; Wien, Wien, nur du allein...

The same theatre burned down in the 1880s when the chief of police announced wrongly that the fire was out and let everyone back in.