Euripides overtook #MeToo

The last premiere of the dramatic poster of the Salzburg Festival was “Iphigenia” staged by the famous Hamburg Thalia Theater. Why did the authors of the play rewrite Euripides and Goethe? Alexey Mokrousov.

The #MeToo movement has reached antiquity: in the performance of Iphigenia, staged by Evelina Marciniak, shown at the Salzburg Festival, the history of the Atrid family cannot be recognized without outside help – the myth has been rewritten from beginning to end. The playwright Joanna Bednarchik moved the action to the present day, although she kept Euripides and Goethe as co-authors – with the addition of frei nach, “in free arrangement”. Agamemnon (played by Sebastian Zimler) is no longer a king, but a professor of ethics, he has just published a book. His wife Clytemnestra (Christiana von Polnitz) is an actress who teaches at a theater school and claims to be the best actress in town. Her potential son-in-law Achilles is an athlete, professionally involved in football, he comes to meet his future father-in-law and mother-in-law in sweatpants. Why Iphigenia (Rosa Thormeyer) fell in love with him does not immediately become clear, however, little is cleared up at the end. Iphigenia is refined, airy, plays the piano and shows great promise. But something is tormenting her, and it soon becomes clear what. Her father’s brother, uncle Menelaus (Stefan Stern), it turns out, harassed her since childhood. Iphigenia confessed this to her parents, but they told her to be silent and not to tell anyone else: Agamemnon was afraid for her career, Clytemnestra was afraid of bad rumors. As a result, the daughter decides to end music: Iphigenia breaks her fingers by slamming the piano lid on them.

The piano is a rare prop on the spacious stage of the former saltworks in Hallein, where the festival shows its most radical performances; last year, the Hamburgers showed here the phenomenal production of Karin Henkel “Richard, the Child and the King” (see “Kommersant” dated August 11, 2021). In Iphigenia, too, there are all the signs of a radical experiment: the text was created anew, the characters eat from the floor, the walls are empty, a huge piece of mirror in which the characters are reflected adds some variety. Endless conversations gradually become less and less funny, although the second part, inspired by Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, takes you to a resort area. The aged Iphigenia owns a hotel, her brother Orestes comes here – after twenty years of separation, his sister does not immediately recognize him, and he does not recognize her at all. The grown-up Iphigenia is now played by Oda Thormeyer, in real life she is Rosa’s mother, and this knowledge enlivens the action, as well as energetic dance episodes: the characters begin to move in a clearly non-antique choreographic tradition, you even regret that we have drama, not ballet.

Until recently, it was fashionable to rewrite the classics – not just to “update” the time and circumstances of the action, but to create your own text based on motives, now it increasingly looks like another theatrical cliché. Especially if the rewriting playwright is not kept up to date: “Iphigenia” simply looks drawn out, something could be cut radically, like Agamemnon reading a fragment of his book, something could be separated – in the break between parts, Menelaus reflects on the moral character in the foreground their hero, while the workers are dismantling the flooring to turn the stage into a shallow pool. Consciousness splits in two, the eye interferes with hearing, why was it necessary to cancel the intermission announced in the program? The theatrical form itself does not give rise to theater, the problems of the text cannot be saved either by acting, or by the minimalist work of the artist Mirek Kaczmarek, or, in the literal sense of the word, a bright finale – the piano flares up from the inside and burns beautifully for a long time, the stage is clouded with smoke, from Handel’s aria “Lascia la spina” tickles your throat, you want to howl from the anticipation of the curtain, but there is no moon before your eyes.

The Polish director Evelina Marciniak has been successfully staging on the German stage in recent years – her Boxer at the Thalia Theater received the prestigious Faust Prize, and The Maid of Orleans from the National Theater Mannheim was invited to the Theater Meetings in Berlin. But the ready-made recipes for today’s agenda – feminist discourse, vocabulary, and #MeToo practice – do not look like a universal remedy. Just as the presence of quality ingredients does not necessarily produce delicious food, so ideological topicality is not yet a great art.

The time of the head of the drama program of Salzburg, Bettina Hering, is coming to an end at the festival, now she is among the main contenders for the post of intendant of the Vienna Burgtheater – the richest in the German-speaking space, with the most eminent troupe. It is possible that the aggressive tone of other comments about this summer’s theater poster is connected with the desire to weaken her position – the intendant of the local festival Elisabeth Slobodka is preparing to leave Bregenz in a completely different atmosphere: in 2024 she will head the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, where the Austrian press has nothing to share . But reproaches to Salzburg are strange – they say, an attempt to rewrite the classics, the search for a new language failed, the festival needs crisis management. The first can be discussed – the current playwrights seem to be afraid to take responsibility for the word, it is easier for them to lean on the classics, they are not able to build a plot and saturate it with ideas; Well, there are no big ideas in the modern world, what can you do, one economy. But about the crisis – it’s strong. The Salzburg Festival has just got a new president, Christina Hammer. The role of the president in Salzburg is traditionally very important, it does not come down to working with sponsors, and given that she came from the Mercedes-Benz Group, and was chosen for “political reasons”, it’s too early to talk about a management crisis: everything just beginning, there is a long, albeit thorny, road ahead. The festival has the right to search and error, art does not guarantee the flow of masterpieces. The readiness of the mass media to equate the achievements of artists with the achievements of athletes is justified in the case of artisans, but at the festival in Salzburg the latter are still not appreciated.