When Jacques Offenbach’s mythical Orpheus has to go to the underworld, everyone wants to go with him. The assumption: It’s funnier down there than in the pseudo-moral heaven. Since yesterday, this opera bouffe can be experienced at the Wiener Volksoper as a very garish gag firework with a large cast and large cutlery.
Landlady Lotte de Beer has invited the British collective Spymonkey and Julian Crouch, who has experienced Austria since the Salzburg production of “Jedermann”, to interpret this classic of the operetta not anew, but rather in the spirit of the original as “physical theater” and great clowning.
Offenbach as stage manager
Right at the beginning, the composer (Marcel Mohah) struts onto the stage with his jumping jacks (Georg Wacks). Offenbach also wants to be celebrated in Vienna and courts, with completely false expectations, for the favor of his audience. The fact that he is not at the Staatsoper, but at the Volksoper, only becomes clear to him very late, to everyone’s amusement.
One hell of a party with Spymonkey
They oscillate between Marx Brothers and Monty Python, Peter Sellars and Mr. Bean – the British-Swiss-Spanish troupe “Spymonkey” is a worldwide success with its “physical theatre”. In 1997, Toby Park, Petra Massey and Aitor Basauri founded their idiosyncratic comedy and physical theater in Brighton, England, and landed a hit with their first production about a funeral home. The British press hailed the complex dynamic of the “High Priests of Folly”. Since then, between London and Las Vegas, between Amsterdam and Helsinki, they have been transporting their audiences to tearful bliss with their shows. Now Spymonkey are taking on the “godfather of operetta”, having commissioned Volksoper director Lotte de Beer to stage Jacques Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld”. It’s her first work at an opera house and seems to fit her comedic signature perfectly.
Everything about this evening is designed for maximum effect. And so one experiences a frankly exhibited celebration of stage craftsmanship. At Spymonkey, the proscenium stage is what it should be: not a space for illusions, but a stage for a production that always celebrates the artificiality of what is on offer down to the smallest nuance.
This Eurydice especially flouts the myth
The implementation under the former Volksoper music director Alexander Joel offers a show of everything this piece has to offer: musical joy, singing across all quality levels – and with a Eurydice (rightly celebrated: Hedwig Ritter) in the middle, which at the end Mann and Jupiter are only too happy to flee the mythical mission as Bachantin. This is in the spirit of the inventor – and in the spirit of the highlight of the ball season.
This time, Aitor Basauri and Toby Parks have ventured into new territory as Spymonkey – and with Offenbach they have actually found what they want with their own theater: making plays that are upside down. So you can experience a tour de force between Monty Python humor and a hell gallop with them, which is understood in a very Viennese way. It’s not going to be all that bad in the end.
At the beginning of the week, Offenbach was still seen as a biting social satire at the Theater an der Wien – more on that in Eine Staatsoperetta mit Beinschab-Tool – but public opinion, played by Ruth Brauer-Kvam, is an authority here that you only use for the purpose of pose fears. With Offenbach, the yardstick for action is simply the effect on the audience; and opinion and public are welcome to increase the glory of the Maker. There is only one role left for the police in this order: they blow the cancan on recorders as a parade of figures. Every policeman a tone That sits in London as in Vienna.
