About the work
Local magic play with dance, song and tableaux in two acts (five parts) by Johann Nestroy, after Victor Ducange's melodrama 'Trente ans, ou la vie d'un joueur' (1827) as adapted by Johann Wenzel Lembert. Nestroy's first full-length stage work premiered on 20 December 1828 at the Landständisches Theater in Graz; censors permitted it only under the substitute title 'Des Wüstlings Radikalkur oder: Die dreyßig Jahre der Verbannung'. It reached Vienna under its proper title on 22 April 1829 at the Theater in der Josefstadt.
Plot
The idle rogue Longinus is banished from the fairy realm into the human world for thirty years. He squanders an inheritance, fails as an actor and as an inn servant, commits a theft and lands in prison; only as a lowly street-sweeper does he undergo a gradual moral transformation before being allowed, reformed, to return to the fairy realm.
Cultural significance
The play was repeated six times in Graz and performed in Vienna repeatedly into the 1850s, with critics praising Nestroy's acting as 'true and lifelike'. For a long time only part of this earliest surviving text was known from later theatre manuscripts, until the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus acquired a 50-page manuscript fragment of the lost original Graz version at a Berlin auction in 2006, revealing substantial differences from the later printed text.