A way with murder

John Malkovich is an actor who's not averse to taking risks: agreeing to appear in a movie in which he played a self-obsessed, borderline insane version of himself (Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich) was one brave decision. And now he's thrown himself into an even more controversial project: portraying the Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger in a stage production that has been accused of showing the murderer in a sympathetic light.

Originally called Seduction and Despair, the play by the Austrian writer Michael Sturminger premièred in Santa Monica in 2008, before completing a run in Vienna in 2009. Now called The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer, it is currently on a tour of Europe and Canada that runs until July of this year. In 2011 it will transfer to the Barbican Centre in London with Malkovich remaining in the lead role.

Unterweger's story is a troubling one. First imprisoned in 1974 for strangling an 18-year-old woman, he was paroled 15 years later after a campaign by Austrian intellectuals - including the Nobel Prize winners Elfriede Jelinek and Günter Grass - which used the acclaimed short stories, poems, plays and autobiography he wrote during his time in prison as evidence that he'd been rehabilitated. On his release, Unterweger became a journalist and TV host, and travelled to Los Angeles. But even while doing this, he continued to kill, and was found guilty of nine more murders in 1994. He took his own life on the night of his conviction, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

While the LA Times praised the play's "graceful, rhythmic lilt and considerable verve", other reviews were more circumspect. "Jack Unterweger was the darling of Viennese society and appears to be so still today," the critic Thomas Jorda wrote in the Austrian newspaper Niederoesterreichische Nachrichten. In an interview via e-mail, Michael Sturminger, who co-developed and directed the play with Malkovich, admits: "If you write a piece, you cannot help to give [the protagonist], to some degree, respect and understanding. In this case, I think, my sympathy goes with the stage character, who is not very close to the real Jack Unterweger. I never felt as if I was making a documentary about the real person, who I imagine [was] less interesting than the Jack that John Malkovich created."

Sturminger denies that his story has a moral, quoting Billy Wilder: "If I had a message, I would send it by post." But he adds that "the background of the whole story is the search for truth and honesty". The play ends with Unterweger's declaration: "I'm longing for the truth as much as you are." By claiming to have created his own fictionalised version of Jack Unterweger, Sturminger sidesteps some of the dangers of adapting a recent, real-life story, which is traumatic not only because of its violent nature, but also because of Unterweger's pardoning by Austrian society before he was released from prison and killed again.

The Barbican's artistic director, Graham Sheffield, saw the production in Vienna and signed it up for its London run. He disagrees with the idea that the play presents the murderer in a rosy light. "Unterweger tries to solicit the audience's sympathy in a way," he says, "but [in the role] Malkovich toys with the audience. He unsettles them, disturbs them, plays with truth and fiction. It's gripping stuff. But I wouldn't say we're ever sympathetic to the character."

Sheffield doesn't have any reservations about hosting the production in London. He says he doesn't expect the audience to be shocked "in a sort of Quentin Tarantino way, because there's no blood and guts and stuff like that" but that "it's shocking because of the emotional and psychological state of the character". He describes The Infernal Comedy as "a very absorbing and unusual piece," and admits: "It's a completely bizarre idea - a baroque orchestra with a mass murderer - but it sort of works."

The 57-year-old Malkovich - whose recent work has included the lead role in the 2008 adaptation of JM Coetzee's novel Disgrace - has been fascinated by Unterweger's story since seeing him on a TV chat show in the early 1990s, being feted as an example of rehabilitation. The actor started a film project on the story 10 years ago, which was never completed, and chose the Austrian writer Sturminger to write this operatic play for him in early 2008.

Completion of the piece was frenzied, according to Sturminger. "I had to write the text, while I was rehearsing Fledermaus in Zürich and later Lohengrin in Germany," he says, "so I had to do it fast and alone. John got the text three weeks before he played and directed the first performances in Los Angeles and I came only to see the first night, between my rehearsals in Germany." Malkovich adopts a soft Austrian accent for the role, and dresses in a cream suit and polka dot shirt of the type that Unterweger wore between his original parole and his death in prison. "There's a sinister charm about him which is actually quite characteristic of his style of acting," Graham Sheffield says of the performance. "He's very intense; it's a very emotionally unsettling piece in that you don't know quite what you're supposed to feel about him, even though he's a murderer."

The actor himself has told reporters that he found the character "haunting," "tragic," and "so touching that I can't even talk when I get on stage". He called The Infernal Comedy "a cautionary tale about where our projected fantasies of redemption hurl themselves, out into the night, not knowing if the ground is 10 inches below or 200 storeys." John Malkovich's career started on the stage, as a member of Chicago's fabled Steppenwolf theatre company, and he made his Broadway debut in 1985, performing alongside Dustin Hoffman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Since then he's worked predominantly in film, alternating art house with blockbuster movies, such as Transformers 3, which will come out next year. "Any part that's really well written, rounded and dense is really fun to do," he told CNN from the set of The Infernal Comedy in Vienna. "I would be just as happy playing Helen Mirren's part in The Queen."

Tickets for the performances at the Barbican in London and elsewhere are selling fast - no doubt partly because of Malkovich's glamour and reputation, but also because of the ghoulish fascination of the subject matter. "It is a very relevant story," Sheffield tells us, "and I think the arts are at their best when they do engage with the issues of the day. He continues: "We're always trying at the Barbican to do things a bit differently and mix the arts in an unusual way, and this struck me as an experiment that was worth trying. I've never seen anything quite like it before."