Blood, sweat and candle wax in Fabre's Wagner vision at @hollandfestival

Holland Festival

Oh, and a too-long fuck dance, roses grow from vaginas and what a spear can do.

But also: singers moving together beautifully, phenomenal dancing, the suggestion of a mountaintop and the complete works of Richard Wagner, from the youth work Die Feen to Parsifal. And that in just over three hours, without a break.

Welcome to the bewildering world of Tragedy of a friendship, the performance created by devil's advocate Jan Fabre together with poet, writer and essayist Stefan Hertman and composer Moritz Eggert for the Wagner Year 2013. A performance with a lot of shock and awe, especially in the first half hour, as if the makers deliberately wanted to antagonise some of the audience. Successfully, because after only 15 minutes, the first spectators leave the hall.

Flanders Opera had to respond, though, and came out with a statement warning audiences about the explicit scenes. However, that audience remained more than divided even after the premiere:

Certainly Jan Fabre is used to controversy, most recently his installation was hastily removed from an exhibition. It featured tarantulas that had to move between razor blades. Fabre doesn't go that crazy here, because as physical as the theatre is, it is clearly a cross between Marquis de Sade and Fifty Shades - contrived. But much more than that.

At Angel of metamorphosis from 2002, the book Hertmans wrote on Fabre, is a fascinating essay on Frabre's theatrical work, in which Hertmans Tragedy of a friendship already flawlessly indicates:

"Dream and experience intermingle; we live for half an hour, an hour, sometimes three hours, in the static and mythical world of the emblem; the stage is no longer an actor's playroom but the inside of a skull, in which dreams overgrown by allegories rage."

And:

"This makes the spectator a voyeur of his own suppressed phantasms. We see something we don't understand ourselves; the theatre itself becomes a tableau vivant, an allegorical performance. He [Fabre] seems to us to wantlen encourage learning to look at that imaginary point in time where the strange rupture between madness and identity occurred, where the memory of ecstasy comes from, the brutal form of fear, the stare into an absent distance."

Hertmans' description of Fabre's theatre work sounds Wagnerian, and it is. Fabre's oeuvre is full of references to Wagner, with Fabre almost always linking ecstasy to Wagner's most gruesome elements.

Because no, Wagner was not exactly woman-friendly now. While men must ultimately be redeemed by women, it always involves death.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the show features a lot of (sexual) violence. At the same time, Fabre and Hertmans play with the audience's expectations. For instance, we precisely do not get a Venus mountain orgy during Tannhäuser, but we only see them after the gods have very painfully removed their burnt clothes in Götterdämmerung. And turns it into Tristan und Isolde not about death, but about the night of love, and deliver precisely the 'innocent' youth works Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot the most gruesome scenes.

In doing so, we mostly see the recurring elements from Wagner operas; lots of sea, swords and - indeed - violence. But certainly in the Ring is also cleverly played with Wagner's motifs. For in Siegfried it is not the Germanic hero who forges the sword, but is done by the dwarves from Das Rheingold - one of them does so disguised as Chinese with an Oriental accent so thick that Wagner's racism is also denounced en passant.

Music

The music Moritz composed for the performance also has many layers. There is an orchestral layer and a trio layer where the theremin voices Wagner's infinite melody. Both are not heard live but recorded on tape, and are complemented by gramophone records with Wagner highlights, while unaccompanied arias are sung on stage.

Biggest problem, however, is that Eggert does not manage to connect these layers. He emphatically states he does not want to make a potpourri, but ends up doing exactly that. Memorable in his music are the obvious Tristan und Isolde-quotes, but when he orchestrates against the record recording of the first bars of Das Rheingold places, Wagner wins.

However, music and stage acting only sporadically reinforce each other, with the projected film images adding little. In this edition of the Holland Festival, many performances explore the boundaries of musical theatre, but the intended synergy is far from forthcoming here.

Nietzsche's nightmares

Central to the entire performance is the friendship between Wagner and Nietzsche, revealing another line of Holland Festival. Last year, Rihm played Nietzsche's moustache in opera fantasy Dionysos, two years before that Jonathan Harvey brought his Wagner dream. However, those expecting the two worlds to be linked this year will be disappointed: Tragedy of a friendship especially shows Nietzsche's nightmares.

But in Fabre's visual language, which shows what Wagner, thank God, sublimated in his operas raw and realistic. But thus forces the viewer to think.

About theatre.

What I see now is not real?

On Wagner.

Wagner is more than just this?

On where boundaries lie.

Why don't I walk away?

About a look in a mirror.

Gruesome, all too gruesome?