ARCHIVES 2014 / Don Giovanni. Letzte Party

By transposing Mozart and da Ponte's Don Giovanni from the opera to the theatre, director Antú Romero Nunes found what he thinks is the best material to talk about freedom today. His hero isn't just a relentless seducer, he puts to the test his own limits and his own expectations in life, and invites all his contemporaries to a great celebration of freedom. Let everybody go with everybody, let's escape from what life has in store for us, and hurrah for freedom! Mozart's songs and music, freely adapted, give the actors' performances even more energy, helped by an all-female jazz-rock band. In order to enjoy life and love to the fullest, Don Giovanni knows that closeness with death is necessary, so as never to forget that everything ends and that one can therefore decide, when the time is right, that one has lived enough and should remove oneself from the world. Before it comes to that, though, Don Giovanni will have shown what happiness means to Donna Elivra, to Donna Anna, to Zerlina... and to many female members of the audience. During the last part of the play, he trades places and clothes with his faithful servant Leporello and disappears into the audience. But the party isn't quite over yet.

In order to strengthen his early work as an actor and director, the young Antú Romero Nunes decided to split his time between Germany (Tübingen, the prestigious Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin) and Chile (where he worked as an assistant director in cinema and theatre). His talent was soon recognised by those he works with in German public theatres, and he began his career as a director by creating play after play, building a style based on an extremely dense and dynamic directing of actors. Antú Romero Nunes is as comfortable working with classics, which he often adapts very freely, than with contemporary authors. Between 2010 and 2013, he was director in residence at the Maxim Gorki theatre in Berlin, where he directed Oliver Kluck's Das Prinzip Meese, which won him the award for best young director from magazine Theater Heute; Rocco and His Brothers, based on Visconti's film; and Heinrich von Kleist's The Schroffenstein Family. He was then invited to perform in Essen, at the Schauspielhaus in Frankfurt, in Zurich, at the Burgtheater in Vienna, and at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Last June, he directed his first opera, Rossini's Guillaume Tell, at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. He has been the director in residence at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg since the beginning of 2014.

After the triumph of The Marriage of Figaro in Prague in 1786, Mozart is commissioned to write a new opera. His friend Lorenzo da Ponte suggests the theme of Don Giovanni. The subject isn't a trendy one, but Mozart and da Ponte will give it renewed strength and a larger scope that we can still feel today. Far from being a character fallen into debauchery, a stubborn man trying to justify his actions, Mozart and da Ponte's Don Giovanni is a generous lord, a freethinker who rejects none of the pleasures to which his station and wealth grant him access. What should he repent for, since he has no regrets? The opera premiered in Prague in 1787, and its success was comparable with that of The Marriage of Figaro.

Laurent Muhleisen, April 2014