A 1931 Novel's Dark Warning Gets a Digital-Age Twist on Stage
Like a festering sore, it spreads and metastasizes: the rumor that, step by step, calls our certainties into question. Long before viral fake news, the Austrian writer Maria Lazar—who died in Stockholm in 1948—captured its destructive power in her 1931 novel Veritas Hexes the City (Veritas verhext die Stadt).
From the outset, the atmosphere in the book feels poisoned. The sky is described as resembling "potassium permanganate when too much is stirred into gargle water"—a lurid, ominous red. The unease stems from anonymous letters sent by the novel's enigmatic titular figure to the residents of Copenhagen. Some contain compromising truths, others outright lies.
A doctor is exposed for his pedophilic tendencies; a woman is falsely accused of an extramarital affair and pregnancy. Others are blamed for poisoning their own child. When one woman dies of shock after the revelations, panic takes hold.
Rumor reigns, sparking a witch hunt for the mysterious author of these defamatory missives—with deadly consequences. Another resident loses her life in the frenzy.
Truth Denied The plot alone makes Lazar's novel explosive, but its form is even more daring. The long-overlooked author crafts a multi-perspective narrative that jumps between her characters' minds like an omniscient director in The Truman Show. Bound to these subjective viewpoints, the reader is systematically denied access to the truth.
Lazar amplifies the effect by weaving gossip into the very fabric of her prose. The story meanders through idioms, clichés, and dialectal turns of phrase, inflating the language until it mirrors the swelling, uncontrollable nature of rumor itself. But can this intricate structure translate to the stage?
At Mannheim's National Theatre, director Katharina Kohler has now tackled this challenging, labyrinthine work—naturally with a modern twist.
Instead of letters, the characters trade in posts and phone messages. Since the original story already shows how accusations, true or false, create their own reality, Kohler's production opens with a semi-transparent curtain between the audience and the action. Over the course of the first act, slogans like "What a bitch. Slut" flash across it, while three projected Instagram timelines scroll with updates about figures like Collien Fernandes or Jeffrey Epstein. Meanwhile, the cast—including Sarah Zastrau, Paul Simon, and Maria Munkert—perform jerky, tic-like movements behind the scrim, as if swept up or puppeteered by the whirlwind of rumors.
"Once suspicion sticks to someone," we hear, "it clings like pitch." It warps what we accept as beyond doubt. To underscore this, Kohler's set (designed by Jodie Fox) includes distorting mirrors that twist the actors' reflections into grotesque, unrecognizable shapes—far from their true selves.
Though the director avoids heavy-handed contemporary references, her staging makes her media critique unmistakable. Digital spheres, much like the French post-structuralist Jean Baudrillard's hyperreality, manufacture illusions that threaten to replace actual reality. At one point, the AI chatbot Grok is asked to generate images of a character in a bikini—or even naked.
The production explores two grim consequences of an amoral online world: the reduction of people to pornographic fodder, and the devastation wrought by smear campaigns. The latter remains as fraught today as it was in Lazar's novel.
Think of the public accusations against male celebrities like Jörg Kachelmann or Kevin Spacey over sexual misconduct. Some allegations were founded; others proved less clear-cut—yet lives were irreparably damaged.
Against this tangled backdrop stands a boldly feminist literary vision—one in which the victims are, without exception, women. Among them is Jeannette, the cook, whom most residents saw as a sharp-tongued troublemaker and immediately suspected of writing the letters.
Yet Lazar leaves us guessing about the letters' true author until the very end. Kohler, too, refuses to single out any one character. Her ensemble often speaks in chorus, with each performer slipping into different roles and occasionally delivering lines through openings in the set.
Beyond the curtain, we see two semicircular, movable walls—cracked and perforated—through which the actors poke their heads. The inner circle serves as the interior, the outer as the house's façade. The costumes, too, feel fitting: time and again, the characters huddle in beige-gray trench coats, whispering like anonymous informants.
Those familiar with the writer's life—born in Vienna in 1895, forced into exile by the Nazis after enduring the painful grip of censorship—will sense the grave undercurrents beneath Veritas Hexes the Town.
"Baby One More Time"
Still, Kohler doesn't skimp on humor or characteristically Austrian irony. Her production, as clever as it is buoyant, deftly embraces the story's fleeting moments of levity—like when one of her actresses delightfully belts out Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time." That one last hit the singer craves, just to feel alive—how good it would feel. If only it could unearth the buried truth, sweep away every lie, and set everything right.
But that, of course, would be a little too neat for an evening this rich in layers.
