Thirds can catch people

In the intelligent new Stuttgart production of Philippe Boesman's "Reigen," based on Arthur Schnitzler and Luc Bondy, director Nicola Hümpel shows that she has a light hand, a lot of feeling and a sharp mind. In the theater, five minutes is a long time when no one says anything and, in the opera, even the musicians sit silently by. In Stuttgart's Großes Haus, however, the production of Philipp Boesmans' musical theater piece "Reigen" gets off to a fabulous start, and the silent prelude does not last a second. Under a suspended roof, ten actors are rehearsing a first performance for the following scenes. Man and woman, woman and man. They eye each other, move around, sniff each other out. After all, there's truth in the saying that at some point people can no longer smell each other. But that will be later. For the moment, the hour strikes them all here, in which they know nothing of each other: the strumpet nothing of the soldier, Mrs. Emma nothing of the young gentleman and the poet Robert nothing of the singer, who is still an actress with Doctor Arthur Schnitzler, who writes the "Reigen" in 1896. Two years after the play is finally premiered in Berlin in 1920 (and immediately banned), Sigmund Freud, who previously had not always had only sympathy for Schnitzler's theatrical mission and soul work, writes: "Her being seized by the drive nature of man, her decomposition of cultural-conventional certainties, the adherence of her thoughts to the polarity of love and death, all this touches me with an uncanny familiarity." No wonder, then, that one of the greatest psychoanalysts in the theater, director Luc Bondy, who died last year, took the original and made it slightly comedic-boulevardesque at the Brussels Opera nearly a quarter-century ago, looking for the joke where you'd least expect it: post-coital, when humans as animals are supposed to be sad throughout. Bondy thought it was hilarious, too, and so did the composer Philippe Boesmans, then already long promoted by musical theater innovator Gerard Mortier and hailing from near Liège, who delivered a curiously spun, quote-rich, masterfully crafted score that was replayed from Frankfurt to Amsterdam. In the theater, five minutes is a long time when no one says anything and, in opera, even the musicians sit silently by. In Stuttgart's Großes Haus, however, the production of Philipp Boesmans' music theater piece "Reigen" gets off to a fabulous start, and the silent prelude does not last a second. Under a suspended roof, ten actors are rehearsing a first performance for the following scenes. Man and woman, woman and man. They eye each other, move around, sniff each other out. After all, there's truth in the saying that at some point people can no longer smell each other. But that will be later. For the moment, the hour strikes them all here, in which they know nothing of each other: the strumpet nothing of the soldier, Mrs. Emma nothing of the young gentleman and the poet Robert nothing of the singer, who is still an actress with Doctor Arthur Schnitzler, who writes the "Reigen" in 1896. Two years after the play is finally premiered in Berlin in 1920 (and immediately banned), Sigmund Freud, who previously had not always had only sympathy for Schnitzler's theatrical mission and soul work, writes: "Her being seized by the drive nature of man, her decomposition of cultural-conventional certainties, the adherence of her thoughts to the polarity of love and death, all this touches me with an uncanny familiarity." No wonder, then, that one of the greatest psychoanalysts in the theater, director Luc Bondy, who died last year, took the original and made it slightly comedic-boulevardesque at the Brussels Opera nearly a quarter-century ago, looking for the joke where you'd least expect it: post-coital, when humans as animals are supposed to be sad throughout. Bondy also found it hilarious, and so did the composer Philippe Boesmans, who at that time had already been promoted for some time by the musical theater innovator Gerard Mortier and who came from near Liège, and who delivered a curiously spun, quote-rich, masterfully crafted score that was replayed from Frankfurt to Amsterdam.

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