Soul of Fire. By Susanne F. Wolf. Directed by Alexander Hauer. The Street Theatre in association with the Austrian Embassy, Australia. The Street Theatre. October 2 to 4 at 8pm (in English), October 4 at 4pm (in German).Tickets $25-$35. Bookings: thestreet.org.au.
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Bertha von Suttner's life makes an intriguing subject for drama. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1905) and the first Austrian Nobel laureate. Suttner was a longtime peace activist who was instrumental in the establishment of the International Court of Justice and a writer whose 1889 pacifist novel Lay Down Your Arms! was translated into 12 languages. She is depicted on the Austrian €2 coin and was on the old 1000-schilling bank note. But her personal life was complicated and difficult.
Austrian actress Maxi Blaha has played Suttner around the world in Soul of Fire, a play she commissioned after reading Lay Down Your Arms. She says, "I was so inspired by her life."
The play combines Suttner's writings and stories of her life with songs, which are accompanied live by guitarist Georg Buxhofer. Some are original works by Buxhofer while others are thematically relevant songs made famous by singers including Nina Simone and Joan Baez.
Suttner was born in 1843 in Prague, then part of the Austrian Empire. She was the daughter of an Austrian count named Kinsky, who died at the age of 75 before she was born, and his much younger wife, who was from a lower social class, which hindered the family's standing. They moved to Vienna, where Suttner was unable to find a husband and her mother was addicted to gambling. After an unsuccessful attempt to become a singer, she trained to be a teacher.
"She fell in love with a student and was sent to Paris to be the secretary to Alfred Nobel by the parents of the boy she fell in love with."
She became friends with Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, but didn't remain with him long: she fled to the Caucasus with her former student, Arthur von Suttner, who at 18 was seven years younger than her, and they married. They worked as teachers and writers but experienced a lot of poverty and hardship, especially during the Russo-Turkish War, which solidified Suttner's pacifist convictions.
The couple eventually moved back to Vienna. They had no children and he died in 1902. She died 12 years later, a month before the outbreak of World War I. But she never stopped her work: she advised Nobel, with whom she had kept in contact, to include a peace prize in the awards he established in his will and took part in many national and international efforts to further the cause of peace.
Soul of Fire was first performed in the Austrian Parliament to commemorate the centenary of the beginning of World War I and since then has been performed all over Austria and in Paris, Istanbul, Oslo and Maribor, Slovenia, as well as in Iran, the US, Canada and Japan.
Now it has come on tour to New Zealand and Australia.
Blaha trained as an actor in Austria and has had a long career in plays and musicals, performing in everything from The Three Penny Opera to La Cage Aux Folles and classical plays.
Her father emigrated to Australia as a teenager in the 1950s and worked as a United Nations diplomat before returning to Austria. He knew the former Austrian ambassador, which helped to bring Soul of Fire to this part of the world.
Blaha says Australia is very special to her and she is glad to be returning to the country for her first professional engagements here.
