On July 4, 1909, Oskar Kokoschka's (1886–1980) first drama “Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen” (eng.: “Murderer, Hope of Women”) (written in 1907) premiered at the summer theater of the Internationale Kunstschau in Vienna. Kokoschka himself designed the color lithograph with the evocative title “Pietà”, which functioned as an advertising poster. The play is characterized by a drastic reduction of action, expressive language often condensed into exclamations, vehement gestures and suggestive colour and light symbolism. While the play marks the beginning of expressionist theatre for many literary scholars today, Kokoschka's contemporaries largely regarded it as scandalous. The play and poster were met with incomprehension by the audience and were perceived as disturbing – the performance ended in a riot that could only be ended by the intervention of police forces. The poster, entitled “Pietà”, can readily be linked to the mourning Mary and Christ's descent from the cross. Even in early Christian depictions of the crucifixion, the scene is framed by the sun and moon, whereby the sun is generally associated with Christ and the moon with Mary. At the same time, Kokoschka translates the originally sacred symbolism into the profane, using it to illustrate the conflict between the sexes – a theme that dominates Kokoschka's pictorial and written work of the time.