So much for the surrounds. Doch nun von “Tristan.”

The Munich Production. Warlikowski is a Polish theatre director of long experience. He seems to have dealt exclusively with artistically ambitious material in an artistically ambitious way. He has ventured into opera, including several previous Munich productions and a The House of the Dead at Covent Garden. He is working here with his accustomed design partner, Malgorzata Szczęśniak, to whom he is now also married. He has received numerous plaudits, including a Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award from the Venice Triennale, whose citation reads, in part, that ” . . . relying on references from cinema and an original use of video, inventing new forms of theatre that aim to re-establish the bond between the play and the audience,” he has set about ” . . . to rip away the paper backdrop of [the audience’s] lives and to discover what is really hidden underneath.”

Well, those are some committee’s words, not Warlikowski’s, so we mustn’t hold him to them. Nonetheless, they get my guard up. Not that references from cinema are never usable in live theatre, but that since with respect to T & I they are by definition anachronistic, they should be chosen with some peculiarly apposite reason, not immediately apparent. And not that I might not benefit from discovering what’s underneath (behind?) the paper backdrop of my life, the person I grant permission to rip it away would first have had to earn my deepest trust. In his brief intermission talk, Warlikowski explains that with Tristan we are between two worlds, and thus, nowhere; that we are between death and life, and “. . . we can play with that” (my emphasis). He might have added that two worlds we in the audience are between are those of opera and postopera. The music of the former remains with us, vying for attention with the actions and sights of the latter. Those, typically, are selected to set askew the narrative of the original, to blur its boundaries, undermine its binaries, subvert its aesthetics, upend its hierarchies, and thus throw into question its system of values. All these are legitimate areas of critical disputation—but not, I persist in arguing, from within the work itself, while pretending to advocate for it and making use of its music and words. This notion of “play” is also typical, and is one of the reasons I term these auteurs not just “bonkers” or “way out there,” but “feral.” They roam the old high culture to tear at it, to trivialize it by playing with it, toying with their prey, and always with a subliminal tone of merriment sounded by the incongruities they set in place. That’s the opposite of “serious.”

For the first three or four minutes, the Munich Tristan is not unpromising. Though the curtain is up, we see only a black void as the Prelude plays. For that duration, Wagner’s music is allowed to establish itself. Then, though, we discern two tiny figures, and as the light on them brightens and we in Vidop Land are slowly zoomed in on them, they are revealed as living mannequins. They wear oversized white heads, bald, unblinking, childlike, androgynous—if you have any baseball imagery in your memory bank, think Mr. and Mrs. Met in zombie form.  A small army of such mannequins will get in on the act here, though these are (I think) the only two living ones, and will at times be studied by the camera for the utter absence of affect we are invited to read into. The live pair will become Tristan and Isolde avatars and, I surmise, their Inner Children, alternating with the humans as enacters, especially in Act 3. Their androgyneity takes a good stiff poke at the heteronormative narrative of which the real opera is the top-of-the-line sample, and which is foremost among the binaries to be toppled.