Kleinkunstbühne
'Larger movements with hands and feet are prohibited for reasons of personal safety for the actors' (14)
Kleinkunstbühne - small arts stage - was the name given to political cabaret shows in Austria. The name reflected the size and limited resources of this type of entertainment. The shows encompassed a mix of sketches, songs and monologues, humorous or satirical, often critical of the political establishment. Viennese audiences would have sat around tables, eating and drinking whilst watching performances.
The very nature of the productions identified the Laterndl as a distinctively Austrian theatre. The first shows were modelled on the semi-underground political cabarets of mid-1930s’ Vienna, where many of the actors and writers had worked before 1938.
The format allowed the writers to respond quickly to events and support the fight against the Nazis. At the time Britain did not have a political cabaret scene so this was a genuinely new type of performance in London.
Some of the sketches were re-performances of material written in Vienna but most were new, written by a team of in-house writers. These included Viennese political cabaret veterans Hugo Königsgarten and Rudolf Spitz and Austrian Centre stalwarts Albert Fuchs, Franz Hartl and Eva Priester.
Woven into many of the programmes were performances by Martin Miller and Fritz Schrecker of traditional Viennese folk songs. The lyrics were often adapted to satirise the Nazi regime. This was a specialism which Miller and Schrecker later transferred to BBC German Service radio.