Sargnagel at the Rabenhoftheater in Vienna: The Festival of Raw Bourgeoisie

You will recognize them by their appetizers! One of those salmon or ham canapés, they are indispensable to combat the urge to burp when the sparkling wine takes over in your stomach. It becomes the bone of contention and puts a creamy horseradish cap on the ball night at the Vienna State Opera. The cameras, both public and private, had long since been dismantled and packed away when the debate about property issues really got going at a late hour.

An untrained guest had found himself among fine people. He believed that the kindness of words that acts as a lubricant in social interactions to mitigate existing inequalities also extended to a bite of food. This led to - stop the bread thief! - an individual asserting his natural right to property by force. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

In any case, she saw it all herself, Stefanie Sargnagel from Stefanie Sargnagel's new play "Opera Ball", announced and performed in Vienna's Rabenhof Theater as a tour de force on the "toughest dance floor in the world". A miniature over 30 pages long unfolds in an inner monologue the virtuoso plebeian diatribe against a crude bourgeois society that has given up hiding behind formulas that create a sense of community.

They know what their "rights" are and are prepared to assert them against those weaker than them without restraint. Disruption, in other words. Wealth gives the freedom to concentrate primarily on oneself, but it is not necessarily conducive to the production of mirror neurons and oxytocin.

All the more, in the literature that rubs up against it, it unleashes a flood of surreal images in the imagination of readers and on stage. Corsets tighten, Botox and lip fillers swell, and sometimes an earlobe is simply pinched off. The ruling class undergoes an initially inconspicuous mutation into tall, long-necked bodies - young women of the anorexic variety - which relieves them of the demands of physical labor that has become habitually inscribed in the proletarian body.

Social conventions cut into the flesh, including that of the first-person narrator, who squeezes her body into shapewear from an expensive lingerie brand and has the theater's make-up artists apply multiple layers of makeup to her for her big performance.

Christina Tscharyiski , Sargnagel's "partner in crime", who has directed all of her plays to date, transfers Sargnagel's stream of consciousness into the four-part setting for a formally strict clownery, which Laura Hermann, Martina Spitzer, Skye MacDonald and Jakob Gühring perform with varying degrees of identification.

They wear the floral decorations themselves (costume: Miriam Draxl). The musician Salò and his accompanying band provide reminiscences of the punk era and its various retro waves. Sargnagel is always looking for biographical links to earlier militant attitudes, to the subculture of the Viennese suburbs.

What Sargnagel calls "fecal realism and loving malice" in her writing is taken quite literally by Tscharyiski and Dominique Wiesbauer (stage) in their journey into the darkness of Viennese society. Little by little the glittering curtains fall, revealing a plush replica of an intestinal tract, inside of which hangs an undigested meat loaf sandwich, on which Salò mutates from a shouter to a crooner, rocking.

But punk has also aged. Eat the Rich was in 1987, and the pillars of society are no longer enjoyable, and toes rotted from the torture of dancing shoes lie around. The four protagonists eventually sink into the tarry substance of dead cell mass, from which the narrator's self rises in a white carriage pulled by a Lipizzaner.

The "toughest dance floor in the world" is perhaps the most overrated party in town after all. So much has been said and written about the ball: bloody fist fights between German B-list celebrities, which stars and starlets, drunk to the brim, almost tipped over the parapet during interviews.

In 2000, the year of the first right-wing government in Austria, a hero of the then Viennese independent theater scene, dressed in the Führer's gala uniform, made his way up to the grand staircase. The protests also became weaker from year to year. What should they be directed against? What levels of corruption still need to be exposed?

It is not the subject matter that makes Sargnagel's opera ball adventure so compelling, but rather her literary method, which on closer inspection is astonishingly similar to the good-for-nothing motif of Romanticism. The ego in her prose meanders through the sensual world without the filter of purposeful action, in order to draw conclusions from the moment of experience that are theoretically stringent, without immediately building a theoretical edifice. Her books are like Bildungsromane, only without an educational goal.

Processing travel experiences was once the privilege of young men of the upper classes. In her writing, Sargnagel has long radically re-encoded class and gender-specific experiences in literature. This makes her a role model in the eyes of her readers, who throws out punch lines in the exotic Viennese idiom and dares to say aggressive or nasty things in a way that is still rather unusual even in the feminist juste milieu.

Incidentally, this was not Sargnagel's first time at the Opera Ball. Years ago, she came as an unknown outsider with plebeian roots in the Viennese suburbs. Now she was invited and unexpectedly got lost in her own ambivalences.

Gossip reporters are bugging each other: "Ah, the writer!", presenters of "Dancing Stars" are sending friend requests. Now that she is being promoted by the German arts pages for her success in the "big form", her symbolic capital must be re-measured. The friendliness from the wrong side is still irritating, but the spectacle knows no outside.

She was on a special mission. While radical austerity measures are imminent elsewhere in the cultural sector, the city of Vienna is distributing an additional 22 million euros for a Johann Strauss year across the entire industry this year, provided that they do something related to Johann Strauss (son).

On the one hand, that's nice because you can see money on stage. On the other hand, it's terrible when everyone is suddenly working on the same topic. Sargnagel and the Rabenhof don't mind. They took the money and did what they wanted anyway. So it's a punk story after all, a "Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" on a small scale, if you will.