"German sounds a thoroughly respectable language, and indeed, I believe is so, " pronounces Wilde's Lady Bracknell. She may, in Gerald Barry's operatic setting of The Importance of Being Earnest, have composed her own patter version of Schiller's "Ode to Joy", but you know she wouldn't have a moment's patience with Oscar's prison rant, whether auf Deutsch or in English.
Jens Harzer, in Berliner Ensemble Artistic Director Oliver Reese's staging of an exceptional German translation by Mirko Bonné (English subtitles either side of the Coronet stage), not only takes us to the abyss of madness and back; he and Bonné also bring surprising parallels with Wagner's religious mystery-opera Parsifal, of which I saw a remarkable Royal Opera production the previous evening. At times, that is, when this figure (be it Wilde or a contemporary) almost makes us believe in a Christ-like suffering. Elsewhere, the overripe refrains echo the craziness of Salome (again, I'm thinking of the German operatic version, by Richard Strauss).
The full range takes us from raging, repetitious anger against the lover (Bosie, of course) devoid of all empathy and imagination to a more general disintegration in the face of obsessive prison pain and finally to a calmer epilogue where, guess what, after all that our not-quite-hero is even looking forward to a reconciliation with the thing he's supposed to hate.
As a letter to Bosie, it's questionable material for the historian or the biographer, and perhaps a tad dishonest as it never deals with Wilde's sexual passion for his young man; as a work of dramatic fiction, it's magnificent, and Reese is right to see its potential for expressionist staging. His direction, the German language, and Hansjorg Hartung's claustrophobic, coffin-like, neon-lit upright rectangle, variously lit by Steffen Heinke, bring us closer to the world of Kafka.
Harzer's vocal timbre is a limited high tenor, virtually mezzoid; the skill is more in the dynamic variety, reaching a central pitch of hysteria accompanied by unfathomable drawing, sticky-taping, apple-eating, chair-propping. There are a few false notes: the music by Jörg Gollasch roughly follows the dramatic trajectory, but not always successfully, and the setting of "Each man kills the thing he loves" is merely banal.
The slow descent to calm begins to feel a bit over-extended, too - the performance runs for one hour 50 minutes without interval - but when Harzer slicks his hair with black dye and finally steps outside the box, there's ambiguous magic: we can't work out if this is a delusional attempt to turn back the clock and be youthful again or something genuinely hopeful. This may not be the acting ensemble implied in the company's title, the polar opposite of the extravagantly staged Ur-Faust I saw at the Edinburgh Festival decades ago, but it fully justifies this team's journey from Berlin. Bravo, Coronet, once again.
