Matthias Baresel as Otze (© Lara Roßmann)
One person writes a text, another composes music to these words, and yet another person is then responsible for interpreting what has been created scenically – this is how the work normally takes place where municipal or state theatres are involved in contemporary music theatre. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this procedure, but there have long been additional ways of working that also lead to other forms. ‘NOperas!’ attempts to introduce them into the music theatre business.
In Darmstadt, OPER OTZE AXT’s play development has now produced its first artistic result. Significant changes were also made during the rehearsal process. The majority of the spoken scenes were cancelled shortly before the premiere. This made the plot more associative and left out a lot of the explanations. ‘The result,’ writes the online magazine “Egotrip”, ’is a coherent 80-minute impression that this theatre, whether grumbling or depressive, is always raging in the minds of the protagonists.’
‘Almost expressionistic’ is how this internalised drama appeared to the Darmstädter Echo after the premiere. In contrast, ‘Egotrip’ feels reminiscent of the form of ‘ancient tragedy’ – on the one hand due to the special role of the chorus, and on the other because of Antonia Beeskov’s commentary voice, an epic element in the style of the classical messenger report.
References to theatre history everywhere. All the way to Rainer Nonnenmann, who is reminded of Hamlet’s father for the silent role of Otze’s father (Martin Gerhardt). None of this seems wrong to me.
‘The epic is at the expense of the drama’ criticises Nonnenmann at the same time. However you judge the whole thing, it’s certainly true: The performance hardly fits into the framework of conventional drama. What is usually told as a psychological plot in the theatre is here packed into a dramaturgy of still images.
The ‘Darmstädter Echo’ is also on the right track when it comes to categorising this project: ‘Despite the title, the term “opera” does not seem appropriate to us,’ it says. Well, even if the word opera appears as a reference in the title, it was never about delivering an opera. After all, the term ‘NOperas’ contains the word ‘opera’ as well as the word ‘no’.
Elections were held in Germany yesterday. 47 out of 50 constituencies in the former territory of the GDR went to the AfD. Did ‘We are the people’ already sound ethnic back then? Provocatively and accompanied by laughter from the audience, OPER OTZE AXT interprets the unification of the two German states as a voluntary self-surrender by East Germany for the price of bananas and welcome money. How quickly the ‘Round Table’ was sidelined at the time, looking for solutions other than simple affiliation. If not as an opera, how could OPER OTZE AXT be categorised? Perhaps as a German-German mystery play about the dialectic of freedom.
