Oedipus has Berlin’s stages firmly under control. The tragedy of the man who unwittingly kills his father and sleeps with his mother can be seen four times in these weeks. The myth is not just a concern of Ulrich Rasche at the Deutsches Theater (SZ from 29.8.) and the Schaubühnen director Thomas Ostermeier (premiere of a new play by Maja Zade on September 19), but also the Deutsche and Komische Oper, which show music theater adaptations of Sophocles’ material almost simultaneously.
Steven Berkoff’s libretto is bursting with blood, sex and violence
The Deutsche Oper achieved a coup with the furious opera “Greek” by the young Mark-Anthony Turnage. Even when it was premiered at the first Munich Biennale in 1988, this settlement with the Thatcher era, which was settled in the London lower-class milieu, hit like a meteorite. Steven Berkoff’s libretto is bursting with blood, sex and violence. It has lost none of its power to this day. This is all the more true for the explosive, aggressive-physical, rebellious music of the then 28-year-old Briton, which sweeps away all style and genre boundaries. On the grandstand of the parking deck of the Deutsche Oper – a paradoxically cozy open-air venue that has now proven itself for the third time – the new conductor Yi-Chen Lin leads the ensemble of low strings, winds, harp, grand piano, celesta and lush percussion with great passion and precision. In addition to their instruments, the musicians also work on rubbish bins or metal rods and with relish throw themselves into this musical road movie, which echoes rap and big band, jazz, rock, revue, Weill’s song style and the singing of the football stadiums, all of a sudden in the middle of the shrill masquerade to flash deeply moving poetry. A kind of higher truth grows out of virtuoso artificiality.
Pinar shows an antique Disneyland where you walk over corpses for a flat joke
The brightly colored comic production by Pinar Karabulut also succeeds in this dialectical change. The ancient plague rages in the East End of London as mass unemployment and impoverishment. Instead of taking up the tough social criticism in a brutal realism, Pinar shows a trendy antique Disneyland in which you walk over corpses for a flat joke. Centaurs with inflatable rumps play here, and the Sphinx is a four-headed, poisonous-pink plastic monster with octopus tentacles. In Michela Flück’s set, two huge hands reach into the room like in a pop-up picture book. Eddy is fed up with the superstitions of his drunk Nazi father and the fearful cuddling mother who warn him about the prophecy of a fairground clairvoyant. He wants to get out, tries in vain to pile over the side fence of the parking deck. He messes with a bar owner, beats him to death from a distance with mere comic language (“Pain! Sting! Bump!”) And tackles the widow. Your love duet is a shrill vaudeville number. Later, in a moment of true feelings, the celesta and harp accompany the unearthly lust of this forbidden love. As the owner of a paper cup café chain, Eddy drives up in the second act in the red luxury sleigh. The dead husband is pumped back to life without further ado and turns back into Eddy’s foster father. All of this is sung splendidly by only four actors, all of whom have authentically appropriated the Cockney slang of the librettos: Dean Murphy is the heated Eddy, Irene Robert, Seth Carico and Heidi Stober slip into the changing roles of mother, father, wife, Sphinx and numerous minor characters. The highlight follows at the end: After a sentimental funeral music on the mythically planned death of Eddy, he jumps up again and defies fate: “Fuck that”, translates the surtitle advertisement. “Yeah, I want to crawl back into my mother, what’s wrong with that?”
In the Komische Oper, the piece drags itself along in a permanently loyal manner
Russian director Evgeny Titov at the comic opera George Enescu’s only opera from 1936, “Oedipe”, approaches it completely differently, namely with a tiring pathos. Enescu and his librettist Edmond Fleg stuck to both dramas by Sophocles, thus narrating the entire life of the tragic hero, from birth to the wandering of the blinded Oedipus and his daughter Antigone to Colonus. Rufus Didwiszus designed a bunker-like standard stage design for this, with gray stone walls and a large puddle in the middle. Eva Dessecker packs the actors in baggy Jesus film costumes, in which they crawl in the water for two hours, bend over and sing to each other with rolling eyes, as if otherwise one would not understand the seriousness of the tragedy.
Tiring: “Oedipe” by George Enescu at the Komische Oper Berlin.
(Photo: Monika Rittershaus)
The baritone Leigh Melrose sings and plays the title role with a great deal of suffering, but cannot really cope with the delicate spoken chanting and the quarter-tones that Enescu’s score demands. The direction leaves him in the lurch. The play drags itself along in a loyal manner, apart from a few cryptic directorial ideas: Oedipus observes his own birth as an adult. A luminous slatted frame hangs from the stage sky and occasionally sinks down like a broken deck chair: the Oracle of Delphi? The threatening fate? You can’t know. As Jokaste, Karolina Gumos is degraded to a sex machine, but her vocals are outstanding. Katarina Bradić also manages impressive vocal acrobatics as an androgynous sphinx monster. A version shortened by 45 minutes is played. Many of the impressionistic subtleties in Enescu’s idiosyncratic score, which alternates between Wagner, Debussy and Romanian folklore, are drowned out in the vigorous playing of the orchestra of the Komische Oper under Ainārs Rubiķis. The fabulous choir makes its grand appearances from the second tier of the auditorium. Overall, however, a missed opportunity.