German première

One day in Vienna, occupied by the German Wehrmacht in 1938, Dr. B. is arrested by the Gestapo and taken into solitary confinement in a hermetically sealed hotel room. His growing psychological restlessness for lack of any distraction – intensified by the Gestapo interrogations – causes him to steal a chess book. He studies the 150 master games it contains and is finally able to play them blindfolded. His ability to compete against himself in spirit reaches manic proportions in the total silence of the hotel room.

“Schachnovelle” is a story by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), which he wrote between 1938 and 1941 in exile in Brazil. It is the last and at the same time the most famous work by Stefan Zweig, one of the most important and popular writers of the 20th century. The first edition of the work was published in Buenos Aires in 1942, and in Germany it has become a perennial bestseller since its publication in paperback in 1974.

Geirun Tino was born in 1950 in Brăila / Romania to an Italian father and an Austrian mother. He studied directing at the Academy of Theater and Film in Bucharest and staged over 30 plays at municipal theaters in Romania from 1974-85. In 1985 he was banned from working for political reasons and fled to Vienna. In Austria he worked as a director and initiated festivals before opening the Pygmalion Theater Vienna in 1995. Here he has staged over 40 plays to date, e.g. based on Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol and Joseph Roth.