BERLIN — The same weekend that Italy locked down much of the country’s north, fears over the coronavirus didn’t stop the sold-out premiere of Kirill S. Serebrennikov’s “Decameron” from going ahead to a full house in Berlin.
It seemed somewhat ironic, given that Giovanni Boccaccio’s collection of ribald tales is set against the background of a plague outbreak in 14th-century Florence.
In this staging at the Deutsches Theater, Serebrennikov swaps out the Tuscan estate of Boccaccio for a contemporary aerobics studio, and the 10 tales that unfold over the course of the production are partly updated. There’s a Wall Street tycoon, but also a king and a queen. Some of Serebrennikov’s retellings bear little resemblance to their source material.
Like so much of the director’s work, the production is never less than grippingly contemporary. Beyond the gym setting, the only other main staging elements are large video panels that display German subtitles when the dialogue is in Russian, plus the contents of online chats, stock tickers, ’80-style video games and trippy projections (by Ilya Shagalov) for several freaky sex scenes.
Serebrennikov is perhaps the most prominent Russian theater and opera director working today, a distinction that owes as much, if not more, to politics as it does to art.
A fraud trial that he currently faces has widely been interpreted as an ultimatum on artistic freedom in today’s Russia. The director spent 20 months under house arrest before being released in April, but he remains barred from leaving Moscow, which is where he developed “Decameron” with actors from the Gogol Center, the avant-garde theater he has run there since 2012, and the Deutsches Theater. (A Moscow premiere is set for June.)
The Deutsches Theater has been a staunch ally during the director’s lengthy battle with Russia’s justice system. “Decameron” was originally planned to play there in 2018, but because Serebrennikov was still under house arrest, the Gogol Center presented other works.
A year later, that company returned to the Deutsches Theater with Serebrennikov’s provocative “Who Is Happy in Russia.” (Berlin will see more Serebrennikov soon, when “Outside,” which premiered at last summer’s Avignon Festival, is performed at the Schaubühne theater’s FIND festival this week.)
“Decameron’s” most impressive feat is how seamlessly it integrates the mixed Russian and German cast. Of the 10 principal actors, the Deutsches Theater’s Regine Zimmermann gets to show the widest range, playing a series of inventively unfaithful wives. The production’s most magnetic presence, she deftly moves between vulnerability and confidence, giving a performance that meets the stories’ physical and emotional demands.
On the Russian side, Aleksandra Revenko is the most striking performer as she uses her hard stare to play a pitiless lover or comically snap to life as a personified bot advertising a beauty product to a gullible woman.
Among the men, Marcel Kohler makes the best impression as a succession of cuckolded husbands. Many of the other male performers spend the evening in various states of undress, moving to Evgeny Kulagin’s erotic, aerobics-inspired choreography and live music that runs that gamut from Bach cello suites to Nina Simone (the latter, sung by the drag performer Georgette Dee, an alluring, if unexpected, presence here).
The movement and music add definition to what would otherwise be a disjointed production, but the long evening ultimately seems less than the sum of its parts. There is greater sense of arc to the two-hour-long first act, but after intermission “Decameron” starts to fizzle out, with some poignant vignettes — a group of older women sharing their love stories with the audience — seeming out of place.
Serebrennikov’s point of departure seems to be that human nature is essentially unchanged from Boccaccio’s age to our own. Like those Renaissance nobles and the tales they concoct, we are still bound and chained by the same drives and obsessions.
Yet while the tales themselves are full of love and sex, this adaptation puts the focus elsewhere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the director’s recent Kafkaesque experiences, “Decameron” is most interested in exploring existential states of confinement.
We are all imprisoned and quarantined by our passions and foibles. Is there a way out? This German-Russian co-production seems to suggest that artistic collaboration and exchange is our best hope.
Decameron.
Through April 27 at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin; deutschestheater.de.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
