The Aix Production.

Auteur Simon Stone, an Australian, has also dealt with theatre materials of unquestioned seriousness—Ibsen, Strindberg, Wedekind, Lorca—but always, it appears, in adapted, re-told form. His work is described as “intimate, almost cinematic,” employing improvisation to arrive at a new scenario “through which the original play nevertheless shines.” The process is called “overwriting,” which seems synonymous with the term I use, “writing the text anew.”  That is taken from Paul Schmidt’s excellent book on Vsevolod Meyerhold, who may or may not have originated the directorial claim to co-authorship, but who, owing to his extraordinary talent, seems to have been the first to make it stick (and who, by the way, staged Tristan und Isolde in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg—the concept is hardly contemporary). Stone has also moved into opera, and will direct Lucia di Lammermoor at the Met in the coming season.

Stone’s “overwritten” script for Tristan begins by overwriting, and, in effect, obliterating—much more thoroughly than Warlikowski’s hapless mannequins—the opera’s Prelude. (“Cinematic” evidently includes putting music in its place strictly as background.) The conceit here is that, as a celebratory occasion with gifts and silly paper crowns moves forward in a modern Parisian living room, the overwritten Tristan sneaks his way behind the bar to make out with an overwritten young thing. His wife, the overwritten Isolde, catches sight of the pair. She’s devastated, but keeps it to herself. As the party clears out, she prepares for bed and lies down. The Sailor, in storm-weather hooded slicker, enters and sings his song to her. She dreams her way into the story, and the twin narratives are underway, with no distinctions of apparel or behavior among the characters, no continuation of any separation of dream from reality. Again, there is a never-quiet projection screen across the back, and again the prevailing flow is horizontal, flat. Co-author Wagner is still present with his words and notes, but the dominance of the visual scenario ensures that his script will remain the underwritten one most of the time. Its “shine” will be fitful.

For the Liebesnacht, Act 2 is set in a big design office with multiple drafting tables and lamps. (Is that Montmartre out the windows? We are almost back in the Louise atelier.) It turns out that Isolde’s the boss here, with a glassed-in private office. During this act, Stone introduces two additional couples, costumed identically to T & I. One, inside the boss’s office at stage right, enacts presumably extramarital sex—betrayal. The other, down left, portrays painful divorcing-couple problems, complete with acting-out kid (do we have a “Son of Tristan” sequel in store?). These minidramas go forward simultaneously with, but independent from, the “main” overwritten/shining-through one clumsily underway amid and upon the drafting tables at center stage. What this does is embody for us some of the connections we would make to our  lives on our own (or not—we might have others, or prefer to stay with the original and muse upon it later), thus fulfilling the auteurial mandate of acting as interpreter, critic, and receptor all at once, and leaving no room for us. In Act 3, the projection screen and the horizontal plane come into their overwritten own, for the act is set in a car on the Métro, and the motion of passing scenery, tunnels entered and exited, stops arrived at and departed from, is ongoing. I suppose I should note that, in terms of stagecraft, both these productions are first-rate, and both run flawlessly. One of two reports on the Aix Festival in the September issue of Opera, by Mark Valencia, tells us that two new Simon Stone productions—this Tristan and the world premiere of Kaia Saariaho’s Innocence—opened on consecutive nights. This surely deserves a gilded page in the chronicle of overweening theatrical hubris, but it apparently went off smoothly, and though at the international level we’ve come to take this sort of technical expertise for granted, we really shouldn’t, whether it’s put to constructive use or not.