A roman à clef, its subject is the theatre and it forms the second part of a trilogy, between The Loser (1983) and Old Masters (1985) which deal with music and painting respectively.

A group of people are awaiting the arrival of a famous dramatic actor from the Burgtheater, the guest of honor, who is coming from a performance of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.

The place is that of the Auersbergers, a married couple whom the narrator hasn’t seen for twenty years: she’s a singer, he’s a "composer in the Webern tradition".

While sitting in an arm-chair, and later at the dinner table when the actor arrives, the narrator observes the crowd around him, reliving the last two decades, his connections and ties with the various guests, and particularly his relationship with a woman, Joana, who had committed suicide and been buried earlier that day.

Eventually, the actor begins an aggressive rant at one of the guests, Billroth, a self-styled "Virginia Woolf" of Vienna and the narrator's fierce literary rival.