Don Carlos

The production Don Carlos by Susanne Øglænd was performed in Black Box Teater while Verdi’s Don Carlo was performed in The Norwegian National Opera & Ballet and in the press release Black Box Teater Susanne Øglænd referred to it as a comment to the repertoire choices of the opera houses.

Don Carlos by Susanne Øglænd was supported by Arts Council Norway, the Freedom of Expression Foundation Fritt Ord, The Fund for Performing Artists and Goethe Institut Oslo.

An interview with Susanne Øglænd about the production is to follow. The text is written by Hild Borchgrevink and translated by Sceneweb’s Lillian Bikset:

The hunt for communication

While a costly international production of Verdi’s Don Carlo is rolled out in the Bjørvika opera, Black Box Teater lets the director Susanne Øglænd run free with the production Don Carlos. Musical theatre after Friedrich Schiller and Giuseppe Verdi.

– The idea is to use the freedom to treat the material one gets once one chooses to stage a production outside the representative frame of the opera. Black Box is an open and flexible venue offering the opportunity to present an experimental production.

Susanne Øglænd wishes to make a production communicating with the Oslo audience.

- It has been important to me to consider Don Carlos in the context the production is staged, and I have chosen to work with musicians, actors and singers from Oslo, knowing their city. In addition I have included my own people offstage, people from Berlin with whom I have formerly worked and with whom I have made important experiences.

Musical theatre as contemporary theatre 

This doesn’t significate that we can expect to see Don Carlos with a bag from RIMI (a Norwegian food chain) in an apartment in a high-rise in the borough of Sinsen.

– No! Theatre in modern wrapping which is just an external wrapping is the very worst I know, says Øglænd. – I don’t think you will get closer to the audience, nor the core of the material, by wearing jeans. A lot more courage and a lot more effort are demanded if one dares to trust the naïve and direct of a work. I am searching for the theatrical: the grand ideas and the processes within a work. For instance the opportunity to change real time into absolute time – and this is only possible within arts. Theatre should not resign in our comfortable, privileged contemporary time. Living today is so boring.

In Don Carlos actors, singers and musicians stand onstage. The text is originally a play, Don Carlos, (1787) by Friedrich Schiller, written by the start of the French revolution.

Øglænd finds material both in the opera and the play. – I don’t expect the spectators to have prior knowledge to the material or to be opera experts. I consider it our job to tell them the story.

The fight against the fathers and oneself

In both genres the story is presented as a grand-scale idea. The action is projected on the historical tragedy around the Spanish royal family in the time of the inquisition under Felipe II during the 1500s.

- Very central in the play is the conflict with the fathers, the patriarchal form government and the young generation’s attempts at dethroning it. In other words, we are talking about a generational conflict with revolutionary potential. The young ones dream about a new form of government in which all people have the same rights, an ideal which is eventually cracking up.

As in classical royal dramas the characters in Don Carlos are conflicted come to their own representative roles.  – These characters are from birth selected to be something more than just an ordinary human being. They are privileged, but at the same time they carry a burden, because the surrounding world demands that they act like heroes. The consequence is that they lose their understanding of reality and become self-obsessed, latently hysterical and rather ill, Øglænd says. – They have been trapped in their own roles, their own pathos – in terms of language and music – they talk, sing and discuss universal topics, but in reality they are confused and misunderstand each other.

The music and the drama

Librettos are often thin come to content. For Øglænd the sequences she personally finds pathetic can be the basis for directorial effects.

- For instance the friend of Don Carlos, the marquis of Posa, spends more than ten minutes dying in the score of Verdi. He is shot several times, but he keeps singing and keeps dying while the music goes sweeter and sweeter. A madcap, totally psychedelic scene! But considered that Posa is the one character who starts the main intrigue, I have let him be represented by an actor (Martin Karelius Østensen) and an opera singer (Patrik Landgren) both. This way I can use the double crew to examine the differences between music and drama: How should the actor react to the fact that the opera singer is allowed to keep dying for so long?

In the drama a point is made out of the lack of communication between Don Carlos and the king, his father. Due to this Susanne Øglænd has chosen Marek Lipok, a classically educated tenor, as Don Carlos, while the king is played by actor Trond Høvik. In Elisabeth, who is the beautiful French princess Don Carlos fall in love with, but the king marries, music and drama meet in another way: Cecilie Jørstad as Elisabeth is an actress, and she sings onstage, but she is not classically schooled. In the scene when Elisabeth and Don Carlos fall in love, Susanne Øglænd has worked with different song styles as an expression for the emotional development.

- This scene builds on a love scene from the opera, showing how an actress moves attempting into a musical structure and fixated expressions unknown to her. How will she and the opera singer Don Carlos get in tune, how do they communicate?

Form and personality

In Don Carlos the music of Verdi is performed by an ensemble of saxophone, double bass, grand piano and percussion instruments. The instruments were chosen for their capability at reflecting the score while adding new expressions and colour.

- To me the choice of musicians was as important as the choices of actors and singers. The musicians have been very involved in making our interpretation of Don Carlos. I got to know the saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm early in the process and he put together a great ensemble with Helge Lien on piano, Håkon Thelin on double bass and Eirik Raude as percussionist. These are musicians with different backgrounds and not least different personalities. From the beginning we have tried to consider the music in a dramatic context in regard to the options in the band. We have no ambitions to make a rock version or a reduced arrangement for a chamber ensemble, or any pling plong version of Verdi. Finding musicians with an attitude to their own work has been important to me, musicians who won’t expect sitting down at a readily made table, but who are ready to and patient enough for developing a musical expression during the rehearsals.

What characterises Verdi’s music?

- I regard it as extremely direct and not very self-concerned. It is exciting to examine how he builds the sequences and to follow how he paces the grand structures. He makes a rhythmic corset putting the characters through an emotional mix master, but they remain true to themselves all the way. They fight the expression, but need it to express themselves. It makes them authentic as characters, even though opera is artificial as an expression.

Verdi wrote at least six versions and reedits of Don Carlos. Susanne Øglænd has spent the summer with the original text of Schiller’s and a grand piano score of the opera containing all six. – There is an ocean of material to choose in, and it is not an easy job. Schiller’s and Verdi’s works are both vast and long and we would have been performing for more than 14 hours if we were to present the whole material. Dramatic cuts are necessary, even though some has already been decided from the choice of ensemble. The audience is not to be scared off. We want them to be entertained with us for, let me see, two or a maximum of three hours. Verdi was a theatre man adjusting his Carlos opera to the city, the stage, the local tradition and the different orchestras and singers he had at hand at any time. That is why there are so many versions, Øglænd says.

What is director’s theatre?

This discussion is also of current interest in Oslo today. The man who is to decide what our new, white gem (of an opera) in Bjørvika is to be filled with, Paul Curran, has according to Dagsavisen said that he is categorically opposed to German director’s theatre. Susanne Øglænd was born to Norwegian parents, but has grown up in Germany and her director’s education has come through assisting and working close with central director names in German contemporary theatre, such as Hans Neuenfels, Sebastian Baumgarten, Claus Guth and Joachim Schlömer. For the Ibsen anniversary two years ago she confused the Norwegian critics with the bilingual production Henrik, lyver du?(literally: Henrik, are you lying? in BIT Teatergarasjen, in which Norwegian and German actors played against each other in each their language, on the same stage. What does she think about director’s theatre?

- I hate the term. I can’t tell you what director’s theatre is. There is a lot of bad theatre calling itself director’s theatre. On the other side I don’t know what theatre should be if it wasn’t director’s theatre... Obviously it is about different ideas of what a work is. The fact is that a director is needed to make theatre and that a director should develop independent visions. But that one relates to the material in a respectful manner is essential. If you study the directors I have worked with, they are very different, and that exact fact has helped me define my own attitude. Theatre is decided by the gut, and the audience is a gathering of people with different systems for consumption.

Sources: Habbestad, Ida (01.10.2008). Review titled Fleirspråkleg infant (literally: Multilingual infant). Dagsavisen, dagsavisen.no, 08.11.2010, http://www.dagsavisen.no/kultur/article366335.ece

Borchrevink, Hild (2008). Interview titled Jakten på kommunikasjon (literally: The Hunt for communication). Black Box Teater program autumn 2008, 11-13.

Teaternett, teaternett.no, 08.11.2020, http://www.teaternett.no/aktuelt/pressemeldinger/2008/0901-01-054.htm

"All of this Øglænd narrates through a patchwork of expressions. Spoken text and sung text are mixed, and in addition to traditional opera arias the music ranges over several genres. The dialogue is in Norwegian, the song in Italian, but there are also components of English, German and French. Onstage is a simple, expressive choreography and the whole thing is made complete with video which at times illustrates, at times interferes with the action."

Habbestad, Ida (01.10.2008). Fleirspråkleg infant (literally: Multilingual infant). Dagsavisen, dagsavisen.no, 08.11.2010, http://www.dagsavisen.no/kultur/article366335.ece