A Don Giovanni without Don before it, without scruples and without illusions, but with a few naked women. #hf10

 By Wijbrand Schaap

Once in a while, a theatre director stands up and wants to expose the emptiness around him or her. That it is about the emptiness within him (or her) himself, this young director usually finds out some 20 years later, once it has become a little less empty. That's how these things go.

We should therefore not be surprised that young and exceptionally good-looking Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna is making an adaptation of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. After all: that musical theatre piece is about an empty-headed man who can have all the women he points to and who therefore meets his end badly. That this is a modern adaptation in which his youthful ineffability wants to talk about the boredom and futility of modern man? To be expected. Therefore, we see a Don Giovanni without Don before it, without scruples and without illusions, but with a few naked women, the necessary blood and opera in the background.

If only it had kind of stopped there.

But no.

To accentuate the emptiness of our modern lives, Jarzyna has the opera completely playbacked by the actors. So they lip-sync excitedly to a version of Mozart's Don Giovanni that is not very well sung and performed. And did they at the beginning still do something with extreme relativisations of well-known Mozart-tunes, by the end the direction falls en bloc for the gothic bombast of the composer who would later fail to finish another famous requiem. The humour, insofar as it was present in the beginning, has long since left the premises by then.

It was a lousy night, this last premiere during the Holland Festival 2010. An evening that also leaves you wondering very much why Pierre Audi, himself a not undeserving opera director, insisted on having this shaky, insipid and ill-considered opera adaptation in his festival. The play also dates back to 2006, so it has had its best time on the boards. That's how the actors stood to deflect, by the way: without much fun and a bit prudish, but that may be the Polish soul.

But then when you look at who will be at Toneelgroep Amsterdam is going to do a direction, the penny drops. Grzegorz himself is joining Toneelgroep Amsterdam to direct Phaedra, and so it was probably TA leader Ivo van Hove who whispered to his good friend Pierre Audi to let our Polish friends take this old play off the shelf. So that we could get used to it already. To that style, which, incidentally, bears some resemblance to Van Hove's work before he stopped doing film sets and started working exclusively on bare stage.

Well. We expect at least a little more content from our friend from Warsaw in November.