A Frame to the Void: Some Remarks on the Staatstheater Augsburg Adaptation of Wittgenstein’s Mistress and a Conversation with Nicole Schneiderbauer

Nicole Schneiderbauer’s adaptation of David Markson’s 1988 novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress – a first-person account of usually single-sentence paragraphs by a middle-aged woman who believes herself to be the sole inhabitant of the entire world – premiered at Staatstheater Augsburg on 18 November 2022, and quickly garnered much praise for its inventive handling of complex literary material. I saw the performance on December 9, three weeks after the premiere. In this article, I offer an analysis of some of the most important creative choices made by Schneiderbauer in terms of translating Markson’s novel into the language of the stage. As proved by my conversation with the director, her bold decisions – which may at first seem at odds with the spirit of Markson’s novel – are precisely what has ensured the remarkable success of the whole enterprise. Avoiding the novel’s more immediately theatrical aspects, reducing it to a ‘condensate,’ pluralizing the protagonist and dialing down on the absurdist humor, Schneiderbauer has succeeded at what may be the most valuable aspect of adaptation: that it is, in Linda Hutcheon’s memorable words, “repetition with variation.”