Author Description

The play takes place at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva in 1898. The central character is Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, "Sissi" and it covers the events leading to her assassination. It is best described as a Gothic tragedy. Switzerland in 1898 was notorious as a haven of political dissidents of all persuasions. The world of the 1890’s was haunted, as now, by the spectre of international terrorism. Attacks across borders had the conspiracy theorists working overtime on the idea that a powerful global anarchist organisation was at work. Italy was regarded as the hothouse of international terrorism and Italians had been implicated in a number of assassination attempts. This was also a time of great change. The treaty of Frankfurt, that incorporated Bavaria and the other southern kingdoms into a newly-unified Germany led by Prussia, was still a cause of friction with Austria where Prussian power politics were deeply resented. In the same period, The USA was growing into a world power. Technology was also changing rapidly. The development of an affordable consumer camera by Kodak in 1888 had begun to revolutionise photography. Similarly photography in magazines was in its infancy but gaining traction. In 1898, the telegraph waSissi has graced other plays in the past particularly The double-headed Eagle by Jean Cocteau. This shares the central deceit of the Cocteau play – thas still the communication medium of choice for international messaging although Geneva had had a public telephone system since 1883. One of the themes of the play is that debate, replayed time and again in anarchist literature, between incremental change and discontinuity brought about by direct action. Princess Diana doesn’t appear in this play but the parallels between her and Elisabeth are clear. They shared iconic status as the most beautiful women of their era, both were probably bulimic and both were hounded by the press. The play borrows Diana’s strategy of active engagement with the media. H