The first night of Caligula at the Kasino in Vienna’s Burgtheater was a total success. The audience cheered the brilliant Cornelius Obonya as the Roman tyrant. Sometimes elated, sometimes restrained, for two hours Obonya let himself go as an impenetrable ruler who is constantly one step ahead of his confidants (who are already grousing and making their own plans) and does not shrink from great cruelty. Members of his family are murdered, the character Octavia (Anneke Bonnema), added to the play by director Jan Lauwers, is raped by a stuffed horse, and his own face is raised to divinity. Caligula is not satisfied with half measures: ‘Objectors and opposing views are eliminated.’ But at the same time he increasingly falls prey to the inner conflict of the ruler, who is never content. The boundless lunacy of his plans is also a parable of the dictatorships, wartime atrocities and political corruption of our own era. After all, ‘ruling means stealing, it’s just a matter of how’. The fact that one does not experience Lauwers’ staging solely as oppressive is due both to outstanding performances by the whole ensemble – in addition to Obonya there is also Maria Happel as the blindly trusting Caesonia – and to its substantial visual and musical charm. Probably the most impressive example of this is ‘The Shimmering Beast’, created and played by Nicolas Field. The play repeatedly shifts into absurdity – singing with bunches of grapes on the head, and when Happel, as high priestess, summons them to worship with all the flair of the disco, and the next moment blood is spurting in every direction and everyone is rubbing it into their shoes.