Austrian Actor Stabs Himself In Suicide Scene

Staff Writter, Dec 22, 2008

You don’t expect it to happen. You’re at the local theater, watching a live performance of a play you’ve been told is really great acting. Settled into your seat, you watch the opening act and it’s pretty good. No, better than pretty good, actor Daniel Hoevels gives a shocking performance at the famed Burgtheater in Hamburg, Germany. Some might say it was one to just about die for recently and we don’t mean that as a euphemism.

It seems that Hoevels’ Saturday performance of a suicide scene in the play called for the actor to stab himself in the neck, which he did. The problem was that a fault prop had been replaced with a real one. Vienna police say that an investigation into “bodily injury caused by negligence” has not yielded any leads on who may have switched the knife but that the Thalia Theater Company knew that the original prop was defective and needed to be replaced. Currently no one has been identified as being responsible for exchanging the prop knife with the real knife that injured Hoevels during his Saturday performance.

Hoevels had to be rushed to the hospital where his wound was treated with stitches and he was later released. True to the calling of an actor, Hoevels returned back to the stage to continue performing his role “Mortimer” in the hit play Mary Stuart the next evening.

No other incidents of this nature have been reported at the Burgtheater in Hamburg, Germany and the Thalia Theater Company has no history of such problems. Vienna authorities are continuing their investigation, however, to try to determine how a prop knife could be replaced with a real one for such a compelling performance as a suicide act.

As for Hoevels, the suicide scene undoubtedly takes on an entirely new meaning each time he performs the Mortimer role now. Thankfully the real knife switch only resulted in an injury that required a few stitches and nothing more, given that it was his neck he put the knife to.

Although it may have put a little more notoriety into Hoevels performance, he declined to make any comment about the switching of the knife and the injury. Maybe some things even for actors are still better left unspoken even in theater.