“Empty Theatre” cover Chicago Public Library
I have a confession to make. I love learning about history, especially when it comes to the royal family. We tend to form parasocial relationships with dead celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley because they were all young when they died. Despite all of the money they had, they never truly found happiness or acceptance within themselves, and there is always that question: if those celebrities lived in our times, would they have found inner peace? We wonder what more they could have done with their lives if they hadn’t met an untimely end. I feel like that rule also applies to Sisi and King Ludwig, who are the stars of “Empty Theatre” by Jac Jemc.
One cousin creates beauty and the other is the embodiment of beauty itself. Ludwig is the mad king of Bavaria, creating beautiful castles in a war-torn country while pining after the famed composer Richard Wagner, who does not reciprocate Ludwig’s feelings. Ludwig does not know it yet, but one of his castles, the Neuschwanstein castle, would lead to the inspiration of Walt Disney’s Cinderella castle and lead to many more girls wishing that they too could be princesses.
Fairytales seem like such dreams when we are children, but as history goes to show, real-life fairytales can be nightmares in disguises, as Sisi learns all too well.
Sisi finds her palace to be a gilded cage as she is trapped in a loveless marriage, and her children are snatched from her by her overbearing mother-in-law, Sophie. Sophie believes Sisi to be nothing more than a child, being only sixteen when she married the twenty-three year old Emperor Franz Joseph of Australia. Sisi realizes that she has lost control of her husband and her children, and she realizes the only thing she has left is her image. Sisi spends countless hours on a lavish beauty routine that puts her name in the history books as the most beautiful woman in Europe. Sisi also finds herself sympathetic to the people of Hungary, who have found themselves swept up in the Austrian empire.
She understands, like them, what it is to be trapped in a hostile environment. The Hungarian people see Sisi as their angel as she takes the time to understand their culture. The two cousins are nations apart, but they are kindred spirits in their isolation and their slow descent into madness. “Empty Theatre” is satirical writing at its best, because although it is written like a fairytale, at its core, it’s a biography of these two cousins.
The title is a reference to how, despite the privileged life they led, Sisi and Ludwig felt like they were always putting on a performance for others and the role that historians dedicated that they should have. They were always longing for something that I don’t think they were ever able to name. They found just brief moments of happiness before they both met their untimely deaths. The book switches between Sisi and Ludwig’s perspectives. Sisi is Ludwig’s beloved cousin but he is the first to die much to Sisi’s dismay.
You can purchase “Empty Theatre” at Amazon, or wherever books are sold.
If you enjoyed reading “Empty Theatre,” I would also recommend “Accidental Empress,” and “Sisi: Empress On Her Own,” by Allison Pataki.
If you’re a fan of foreign films then there’s the Romy Schiners “Sisi” movie trilogy; every scene of that movie is straight out of a fairytale picture book. There’s also Italian director Luchino Viscounti who directed “Ludwig” on site at the Neuschwanstein castle.