“Everyone does it” by Dmitry Chernyakov in Aix-en-Provence. Review

The central event of the Festival d’Art Lyrique, which ended in French Aix-en-Provence, was the premiere of a new production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera “That’s the Way Everyone Do It”, directed by Dmitry Chernyakov. comments Dmitry Renansky.

“Everyone does it this way” still seemed in absentia to be a title ideally suited to Dmitry Chernyakov – many of the main themes and favorite techniques of his theater are embedded in the very dramatic nature of Mozart’s opera. The plot of how two young gentlemen, incited by the old cynic Don Alfonso, make a bet, seducing each other’s brides crosswise, and in the original source looks like a sophisticated psychological experiment typical of Chernyakov’s performances, after which the life of its participants will never be the same. No happy ending here, of course, is possible – too many new and unexpected heroes of “Everyone Does It So” learn about themselves, turning to each other with the dangerous and secret sides of human nature. Chernyakov sums up the experience of the European opera scene of the last two decades and finally breaks with the tradition of staging “Everyone Does It So” as a sunny-playful buffoonery with confusion and dressing up, following Patrice Chereau and Michael Haneke, refusing to see in it only an intoxicating joke in the spirit of the gallant XVIII century.

To begin with, the director takes a step unprecedented in the recent history of musical theater: in the original, the characters in “Everybody Does It So” are young and naive, while Chernyakov entrusts the main parts to singers of the 50+ age category – thereby radically changing the proposed circumstances of Mozart’s opera and what Stanislavsky called “the nature of feelings”. Two outwardly prosperous couples, who have many years of married life behind them, decide to spice up their relationship and freshen up by escaping from society and spending the weekend at an elite country swing club. Very soon, a lightweight game turns into the most difficult test that Fiordiligi (Agneta Eichenholz), Guglielmo (Russell Brown), Dorabella (Claudia Manke) and Ferrando (Rainer Trost) can not stand – the house of cards of imaginary mutual understanding collapses, couples break up.

The fabric of Chernyakov’s performances has never been so nervously torn, nakedly painful, woven from attraction, jealousy, attraction and substitution — against the backdrop of a sterile design interior, as if descended from the pages of Architectural Digest, they look especially prominent. Never before has Chernyakov come so close to his idol Rainer Werner Fassbinder, not so much on the plot level as on the language level: it is no coincidence that the frames from his Chinese Roulette are published in the booklet as one of the keys to the director’s intention. The detached ruthlessness of chamber drama knocks the ground out from under the viewer’s feet, takes him out of his comfort zone in a very special course of time, more characteristic of auteur cinema or drama theater. The number structure of Mozart’s opera allows Chernyakov to rip open the score with extremely long pauses by the standards of the musical stage – they condense internal tension that will literally crush the characters in the finale of the performance. Routine normality, just like in many Fassbinder films, is swept away by an explosion of dehumanization. “Are you ready to marry and be faithful until death do you part?” – this mocking closing credit from “Chinese Roulette” could well be the epigraph to “Everybody Does It”.

The interpretations of Dmitry Chernyakov almost always depend on whether the music director of the production is ready to accept the rules of the game, how sensitive he will be to the dramatic cardiogram of the play. In this sense, maestro Thomas Hengelbrock at the Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble did everything to make the screenings in Aix-en-Provence perceived as more like a dress rehearsal before the premiere, scheduled for February next year at the Chatelet theater in Paris, where Chernyakov’s “Everybody does it this way” will move (but with Christophe Rousset and the Les Talens Lyriques orchestra). In the absence of a coherent conductor’s will, it was all the more instructive to watch the work of an ensemble of soloists led by Georg Nigle, well known to the domestic public from Chernyakov’s Wozzeck at the Bolshoi Theater. 14 years later, he literally “steals” the performance, turning the role of Don Alfonso into a central one – Neagle plays in detail the process of how an imposing eccentric bourgeois in a canary suit gradually discards conventions, showing the true face of a sadist and psychopath. Feelings of vague, inexplicable anxiety in the auditorium, Nigel, at the very first appearance on the stage, achieves purely musical means. He intones the Mozart part with diabolical sophistication, literally balancing on the verge of singing and recitative, Italian language and a distinct German accent, reminiscent of Arnold Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme and the cabaret of the early twentieth century: this is how vice sounds, rapture from power over other people’s lives.

Following Haneke, Chernyakov combines Alfonso and Despina (Nicole Chevalier) by marriage: the owners of the swing club, born killers, they almost do not leave the stage throughout the performance, controlling the feelings of their victims, and with them the ingeniously arranged claustrophobic basement space, the Jungian realm of the subconscious. From the fashionable living room, the action is constantly transferred to two small rooms, separated by high transparent walls and silent curtains, which come into motion whenever the director needs to show or, conversely, hide what is happening behind them. What remains behind the scenes turns out to be ultimately more important – Chernyakov skillfully pumps up suspense, giving scope to the inflamed imagination of the participants in the experiment on both sides of the ramp. However, almost more suspense arises in episodes when Nigle-Alfonso and Chevalier-Despina simply sit on opposite sides of the table, resting their heads on their hands and silently looking into each other’s eyes: nothing seems to be happening, but the degree of tension at these moments reaches a point where, it seems, a little more – and the glass walls will now burst.