Afterlife
Michael Frayn’s play traces Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt’s life and career from his work to revive the Salzburg Festival in 1920 through his death in New York in 1943.
Loading credits…
Loading credits…
Michael Frayn’s play traces Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt’s life and career from his work to revive the Salzburg Festival in 1920 through his death in New York in 1943.
In 1860s Vienna, the financially troubled Waldner family hopes to marry off Arabella, while her sister Zdenka is disguised as a boy. Zdenka secretly loves Matteo and sends him letters signed with Arabella’s name to keep him from despair. Arabella falls for Mandryka, who has inherited his uncle’s fortune and proposes. A mistaken identity at the hotel leads Mandryka to suspect Arabella, but Zdenka reveals the truth, Matteo agrees to marry Zdenka, and Arabella and Mandryka reconcile.
A wealthy Viennese host orders a serious opera and a commedia dell’arte troupe to perform simultaneously after the evening’s dinner runs late. The young Composer reluctantly accepts, then despairs over the changes. In the opera within the opera, Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos, mourns her lost love and longs for death. Zerbinetta and her troupe try to cheer her, with Zerbinetta advising her to find another lover. Ariadne mistakes Bacchus for the messenger of death, but they fall in love and she agrees to follow him.
In Vienna, the Marschallin’s young lover Octavian is asked to serve as the Knight of the Rose for her cousin Baron Ochs, who is engaged to Sophie von Faninal. When Octavian presents Sophie with a silver rose, they fall in love. Sophie refuses to marry Ochs, and Octavian helps her devise a scheme to break the engagement. Ochs is caught in a compromising situation and leaves in disgrace. The Marschallin recognizes that Octavian loves Sophie and lets him go; the young couple reunites.
The Empress, daughter of the spirit king Keikobad, has no shadow. Unless she obtains one, her father will reclaim her and her husband, the Emperor, will turn to stone. She and her Nurse descend to the human world and try to obtain the Dyer’s Wife’s shadow. The Empress refuses to take it at the cost of the other woman’s future happiness. She receives a shadow of her own, the Emperor is restored, and the Dyer and his Wife reunite.
The sorceress Aithra shipwrecks Helen and Menelaus to save Helen from her husband’s murderous jealousy. She tells Menelaus that the real Helen was hidden away years earlier and that his wife had been a phantom, then uses magic and a potion to reunite them. Menelaus later kills Da-ud while hunting and believes he has killed Paris; Aithra helps restore the couple, and their daughter Hermione is reunited with them.
At the palace of Mycenae, Elektra mourns her murdered father Agamemnon and urges her sister Chrysothemis to help avenge him by killing their mother Klytaemnestra and her lover Aegisth. Chrysothemis refuses. Elektra meets Orest, returned in disguise, and learns he will carry out the revenge. Orest and his followers kill Klytaemnestra and Aegisth. Elektra celebrates the deaths in a frenzied dance and collapses, dead.
God sends Death to summon the wealthy bon viveur Jedermann. His friends, wealth and mistress abandon him as he faces death, in Hofmannsthal’s morality play drawing on several medieval mystery plays.
When God sends Death to summon the wealthy Everyman, he has one hour to find someone to accompany him. Friends and riches refuse; Good Deeds and Faith join him as his journey confronts his treatment of the poor and his spiritual neglect. Sterling's reworking adds War and Workman and reshapes the medieval morality story through modern social themes.
Michael Frayn’s play traces Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt’s life and career from his work to revive the Salzburg Festival in 1920 through his death in New York in 1943.
In 1860s Vienna, the financially troubled Waldner family hopes to marry off Arabella, while her sister Zdenka is disguised as a boy. Zdenka secretly loves Matteo and sends him letters signed with Arabella’s name to keep him from despair. Arabella falls for Mandryka, who has inherited his uncle’s fortune and proposes. A mistaken identity at the hotel leads Mandryka to suspect Arabella, but Zdenka reveals the truth, Matteo agrees to marry Zdenka, and Arabella and Mandryka reconcile.
A wealthy Viennese host orders a serious opera and a commedia dell’arte troupe to perform simultaneously after the evening’s dinner runs late. The young Composer reluctantly accepts, then despairs over the changes. In the opera within the opera, Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos, mourns her lost love and longs for death. Zerbinetta and her troupe try to cheer her, with Zerbinetta advising her to find another lover. Ariadne mistakes Bacchus for the messenger of death, but they fall in love and she agrees to follow him.
In Vienna, the Marschallin’s young lover Octavian is asked to serve as the Knight of the Rose for her cousin Baron Ochs, who is engaged to Sophie von Faninal. When Octavian presents Sophie with a silver rose, they fall in love. Sophie refuses to marry Ochs, and Octavian helps her devise a scheme to break the engagement. Ochs is caught in a compromising situation and leaves in disgrace. The Marschallin recognizes that Octavian loves Sophie and lets him go; the young couple reunites.
The Empress, daughter of the spirit king Keikobad, has no shadow. Unless she obtains one, her father will reclaim her and her husband, the Emperor, will turn to stone. She and her Nurse descend to the human world and try to obtain the Dyer’s Wife’s shadow. The Empress refuses to take it at the cost of the other woman’s future happiness. She receives a shadow of her own, the Emperor is restored, and the Dyer and his Wife reunite.
The sorceress Aithra shipwrecks Helen and Menelaus to save Helen from her husband’s murderous jealousy. She tells Menelaus that the real Helen was hidden away years earlier and that his wife had been a phantom, then uses magic and a potion to reunite them. Menelaus later kills Da-ud while hunting and believes he has killed Paris; Aithra helps restore the couple, and their daughter Hermione is reunited with them.
At the palace of Mycenae, Elektra mourns her murdered father Agamemnon and urges her sister Chrysothemis to help avenge him by killing their mother Klytaemnestra and her lover Aegisth. Chrysothemis refuses. Elektra meets Orest, returned in disguise, and learns he will carry out the revenge. Orest and his followers kill Klytaemnestra and Aegisth. Elektra celebrates the deaths in a frenzied dance and collapses, dead.
God sends Death to summon the wealthy bon viveur Jedermann. His friends, wealth and mistress abandon him as he faces death, in Hofmannsthal’s morality play drawing on several medieval mystery plays.
When God sends Death to summon the wealthy Everyman, he has one hour to find someone to accompany him. Friends and riches refuse; Good Deeds and Faith join him as his journey confronts his treatment of the poor and his spiritual neglect. Sterling's reworking adds War and Workman and reshapes the medieval morality story through modern social themes.