Director Àlex Ollé returns to the Teatro Real in Madrid with the great challenge of directing the stage of his second adaptation of Wagner. Having successfully premiered it at the Opera de Lyon, Der Fliegende Holländer landed in Madrid to perform 10 functions between December 17th and January 3th 2017.
Could nowadays a story like that happen? Can life be of such little value that when death stands besides him, that option doesn’t seem like such a bad idea? Is there anyone who still believes in this emanation of hell? These are some of the questions that has arisen to address the principal creating of the staging of the show.
And so, with the intention to preserve the original values, is how the rereading of this legend, created by Wagner, emerged. Der Fliegende Holländer in which the sea, the central metaphor, has dried up. The Flying Dutchman is now a boat stranded in an industrial surrealism desert. A group of men and women, an ancient tribe almost half pirates and slave merchant ships, have already begun to dismantle it. What emerges from the bowels of the ship, its crew, its captain are now the same ghosts of operators that destroy it. It’s their desires, their ambition, desire for power, wealth, freedom, their fears. It is an emanation of polluting waste from the aspirations of a society on the edge of hell.
With La Fura dels Baus’s umpteenth rereading of Der Fliegende Holländer returns the legend and the realism of the opera to the public through a series of emotions that, since Wagner’s time haven been transformed, preserving the romantic sentiment of the absolute right how the composer percepts it in the sea. Der Fliegende Holländer’s boat, haunting, is the space where the memory of a legend lives, a presence that while the opera advances will suffer a process of scrapping. In this version the circularity of time breaks and the main characters live a hell with no end.
The strength of dismemberment precludes any boat navigation and therefore the possibility of legend, also deconstructing the myth of Der Fliegende Holländer to a viewer who will face the rationalism of the modern man and the magical universe of the archaic man, where feeling love for a damned hero is still possible.
The official premiere of the show will be on Saturday, December 17th. However, during the same month it will be carried out for 9 more functions. For more information, dates, schedules and ticket sales you can consult the official website of the Teatro Real de Madrid.
