Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen” as a technoid pastiche

Attention: This is not Richard Wagner’s «Ring»! Here the prelude to «Rheingold» is not played and no finale to «Götterdämmerung» is sung. Wagner is hardly there at all in this production at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. Rather, it is an insidious misnomer, a witty knock-off, a pastiche with pepper. The German-Turkish writer Necati Öziri rewrote the “Ring des Nibelungen” for the Zurich production (director: Christoph Rüping) in order to drive the German artist out of his own work, as it were – along with his ingenious fantasies of omnipotence and his anti-Semitic clichés.

Wagnerian heroism is melted down, so to speak, in order to gain material for genuine humanity. You can take that almost literally: the stage (Jonathan Mertz) turns out to be a candle factory. In the light of the burning candles, which are finally distributed among the audience, a new church is to be formed one day. Necati Öziri does refer to the «Ring», but he allows the characters of this influential work of leading German culture to appear in a different light. For example, the evil dragon becomes a very sympathetic beast.

No wedding party

At the beginning of the production, Öziri explains his intentions himself. In a funny introduction, he makes no secret of the fact that he had never been to the opera before this project. And when the news of his “ring” made the rounds in his Turkish family, his mother and uncle are said to have been looking forward to an imminent wedding.

Öziri’s performance opens a series of witty monologues, which sometimes pull threads a bit. The theatrical freestyle is musically timed and accompanied by Black Cracker. As a DJ, he mixes live tracks from eight producers who have studied Wagner’s composition. In their techno loops, the motifs appear less majestic, but all the more ecstatic. Unless they are ironically alienated: like the “Ride of the Valkyries” in an asthmatically fluted version.

The audience also has to play along this evening. We visitors are addressed as a divine establishment, as an old, Germanic clique doomed to perish, as is suggested to us from the stage. OK! For a change, we like to play God Wotan or at least one of his relatives on Valhalla. So we forget for once that everyday life is stressful, that the children bully us, that the bosses boss us around, that the stock market weighs on us, that politics overwhelms us and that age affects us just as much as the weather.

We are the mighty ones now, listening to the Earth Mother Erda (Yodit Tarikwa). With her head wreathed in golden rays and a flowing, billowing robe, she has a solemn appearance. Her words are all the more serious. “What happened to the Greeks?” she asks her servants. “Sunk,” shouts the chorus. “What happened to the Romans?” “Sunk!” It goes on like this to the Soviets and back to the Persians until everyone in the audience realizes: Ow, we westerners are next!

What’s the whining?

And then Alberich (Nils Kahnwald) goes one better. He alienates us by accusing one of lack of hair, another of being overweight, one of bad odors, the other of bad taste. But then the gnome suddenly starts to whine about loneliness and depression. As a child he was overlooked and forgotten while playing hide and seek – by us! Life can certainly be tough. But why is it our fault?

The allegations against Wotan and his followers never end. This is how the argumentative Brünnhilde (Wiebke Mollenhauer) speaks of her emancipation in feminist fire. Wotan’s favorite daughter has realized that she is not allowed to play an active role in her father’s world. As a woman, she only has to honor Valhalla’s heroes with her body. But that will soon be the end of it. A ship will come, we learn from Brünnhilde’s poisonous mouth, whose crew will conquer Valhalla and finish off the old machos.

The theatrical power of suggestion and dynamism are maintained at a consistently high level during this nearly four-hour evening of theatre. And yet there are outstanding moments. Maja Beckmann in the role of Wotan’s wife Fricka, for example. With a slightly different tone of voice, she tells of fleeting passion, love betrayal, rejection, ignorance, but also of hope and new happiness in ambiguous memories.

The giant brothers Steven Sowah and Benjamin Lillie, on the other hand, really heat up the audience in a virtuoso, synchronously rattled hate tirade: their parents were the workers, the foreign workers so to speak, who would have built Valhalla for us. Separated from their parents, they, the sons, lost their family happiness. So now they presented us with their bill. They claim our possessions, our time, actually our lives.

Angry citizen Wotan

But at some point the demands and criticism have to come to an end. Our Aryan, Germanic, European, Western, capitalist world is doomed – yes, yes, we got it! But nobody seems to notice that this young, diverse and spoiled clique on stage also benefits from our civilization, our culture, our tax-financed theatre. They should learn something real! And work . . .

One already wants to start up to stand up to the stage artists when someone else rises up ahead to rant. In a ludicrous solo, Matthias Neukirch now plays Wotan as an angry citizen who puts on armor himself. He reminds the world that he once created an order out of chaos that he, seething with rage, was ready to defend against future generations. The mocked god conquers the stage one last time in a hydraulic chariot, then he withdraws to the champagne party in the theater foyer.