An authenticity that can no longer be concealed

The drama of Salome is the chapter of a family tragedy. The initial situation has surprising parallels to Hamlet: The mother has married, in her second marriage, the man who killed the father of her child and who is also the brother of her first husband. That is very Elizabethan. We also focus primarily on exploring this family structure.

Wilde tells us that Salome was fourteen years old when her father was killed. Jochanaan is imprisoned in the same cistern where her father languished for twelve years. So she hardly knew her father. When she hears Jochanaan's voice coming through the bars of the cistern, it conjures up memories of her father's cries of lamentation. When Salome compares the cistern to a tomb, she is referring to the murder of her father, who was strangled to death at Herod's behest. Jochanaan is the only man who does not look at Salome, and at the same time the only man who looks at her in a good and proper way, as her father would have looked at her. Jochanaan opens up something very powerful in Salome. It is about the love story of a child who was loved wrongly or loved too much, as Herod himself acknowledges. In Herod's time, it was possible to marry fourteen-year-old children; Herod even hints at this possibility. In the year 2023, the play confronts us with another problem that we must not accept.

Exactly. In the opera, Salome is portrayed by an adult woman, which means that we almost inevitably see and judge Salome as a woman. I see my task as liberating the child in her who is held captive by the gaze of others, or more correctly: to assist her in this struggle for liberation. I deal with this delicate problem in a poetic way. The play allows us to confront violence and villainy artistically with beauty.

The mouth plays a central role: the mouth from which the words of the speech emerge, but also the mouth that eats and absorbs the food. The play repeatedly focuses on fruit and wine. At the end, Salome will serve Jochanaan's head as the last course, thus disfiguring a cannibalistic society to the point of recognizability, in which people devour each other, although we initially believe we are experiencing an outwardly perfect, cultivated dinner party. The banquet plays a leading role, as in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, where an existential drama unfolds beneath the seemingly relaxed surface of a festive party.

This is also very contemporary. We are increasingly losing our sense of hearing and smell; perception is now controlled by the eye. One of the two great myths on which Salome is based is the Orpheus myth: Salome descends into the underworld to find Jochanaan and in him her lost father, just as Orpheus seeks Eurydice there. And when you look around, you lose what you love.

The second myth is the gaze of Gorgo Medusa, the gaze that petrifies and kills. And the gaze also refers to the theater - "theatron" etymologically means "place of looking", space of seeing. The heroine of our play forces us to question our view in and of the theater: From where do we look, what can we see, what do we not see, what do we say, and why is what is said not identical to what we see? It is the story of a forbidden and hidden, an impossible love. Salome tries to rediscover and restore what society has destroyed in her. The reason why Jochanaan does not want to look at her is that Salome's gaze contains all the corrupt, depraved looks of her milieu. In the end, she asks the severed head: "Why didn't you look at me? If you had looked at me, you would have loved me." An unspeakable pain. A pain that everyone has to deal with - we all suffer from not being looked at or being looked at wrongly.

I want the images we produce to speak to us, to address our ears, so to speak. A picture must speak to me, that is my conviction, it should show nothing, depict nothing. I filter the portrait of Salome and the portrait of her family through the gaze of the camera's eye, especially the dance of the seven veils. We are at a diplomatic banquet where a photographer and a cameraman are producing images for the public. And Salome uses this by reversing the direction of the gaze. She uses the image as a weapon to show the world the eyes to which she was exposed. The score is settled between Herod and Salome, both move too close to each other in the camera images, we see his hand seeking hers. The whole play begins with the young woman's protest, "Why does the tetrarch keep looking at me like that?", and it ends with Herod no longer being able to bear the sight of her and ordering her to be killed. Jochanaan, on the other hand, is not captured by the camera. Gilles Deleuze said the wonderful sentence: "Every close-up is tenderness/affection." It is precisely this closeness and tenderness, in the most well-meaning sense, that we have to find when dealing with Salome. The camera helps us to show Salome as beautifully as possible. Not a single image we show of her is malicious.

The performers often come to the rehearsal with a ready-made idea. My work initially consists of deconstructing these ideas. Our job in the theater is not to explain, but to understand. It is crucial that all participants understand that it is about an unfinished collective exploration, a collective process of experience.

I am reminded of Tarkovsky, who spoke of an authenticity that is so great that it can no longer be concealed. You have to search for this authenticity and intimacy together with the performers. And this authenticity no longer needs to be explained or illustrated. The theater does not need to explain the world, it is a resonance chamber, an echo chamber of the world. And right: you can create the most beautiful images, lighting moods and settings - if the actors inside your construct are not authentic, then everything else is no good either. The content, the idea determines the form.

I don't know what I'm going to say before the actual rehearsals start. Because that depends on the performers. They give me the energy from which my performance emerges. I am only the cartographer, it is the singers who enter the thicket of the forest and penetrate it. You also have to allow for chance. Chance is a great dramaturge. Now, three weeks after the start of rehearsals, I am - perhaps - beginning to understand. Theater is not a picture, but something alive. You can only understand it by experiencing it.