Breaking taboos is common on the Berlin stage, but a production of a Mozart opera is provoking strong reactions, writes Derek Scally
Rape and nudity are Berlin theatre's stock - or, rather, shock - in trade. Rarely does a play open in the city that doesn't involve the cheap conceit of skin, blood or urine presented in a faux-intellectual framework. This sure-fire way of getting media coverage and bums on seats has just been employed, with ringing success, for a new production of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Seraglio) that has broken all taste taboos and house records at Berlin's Komischer Oper.
Catalan director Calixto Bieito has discovered the key to instant success in theatre passed down through the decades from Oh! Calcutta to Hair: get your actor's clothes off and you've got a hit.
Bieito's production updates Mozart's comic opera from an 18th century Turkish palace to a modern-day, drug-filled brothel and met with cries of "Scandal!" and "That's not Mozart!" on opening night.
The naked actors prance around a lurid pink set knocking back Valium and vodka while simulating sex and urinating. One woman gets slashed with a knife while the opera's heroine, Konstanza, is kept in a cage and is violently raped by the villain, Selim Pasha. Her lover, Belmonte, slaughters a brothel-ful of prostitutes and their pimps. After the slaying, a voice from the audience on opening night shouted: "Now for the director!"
The opera was warmly received by the audience - those who made it through to the end, that is. Crowds started to drift out after Pasha presented Konstanza with the nipples of a prostitute he had just hacked to pieces. One grumpy man hobbled up the aisle muttering: "I'm off to watch the football." "When the prostitutes were massacred on stage I had to leave," said Matthias Kleinert, an adviser to DaimlerChrysler, the opera house's sponsor, which is reportedly "examining" its sponsorship deal. "The overall depiction of sex and violence is absolutely unacceptable," Kleienert told the Bild tabloid. The newspaper, which carries pictures of topless women on its front page every day, ran breathless reports over several days about the shocking opera.
Not everyone in the audience was fazed by the performance.
"I don't know what the fuss is all about," said Christiane Hermann, a music educationalist. "If they knew anything about Mozart, they'd know that there's loads of this sort of thing in his letters." Berlin's cultural senator, Thomas Flierl, was similarly supportive, saying opera needs to be "a true reflection of social phenomena".
Mr Andreas Homoki, the Komischer Oper's artistic director, said he understood DaimlerChrysler's concerns and said it was "legitimate . . . if a trustee withdraws because it can't identify with the theatre any more".
But the Komischer Oper, Berlin's third and most overlooked opera house compared to the Staatsoper and the Deutsche Oper, knew what it was getting in Bieito: notoriety.
His English National Opera (ENO) production of Verdi's A Masked Ball featured satanic sex acts and homosexual rape while his production of Die Fledermaus for the Welsh National Opera is best remembered as an evening of swearing, violence and group sex.
Bieito said his production in Berlin was an attempt to highlight abuses in the sex trade, but his efforts left the critics unimpressed. "Mr Bieito misses no opportunity to show on our stage, with full use of various bodily fluids, how depraved our society has become, even if he has to fiddle around with the libretto," sniffed Der Spiegel.
The Financial Times called it "puerile attention-seeking", adding: "If our sensation-hungry opera world has to go to this length to get press attention, we have a problem."