Mass hysteria

After the excitement of this show’s Stuttgart staging two years ago — with swathes of the audience throwing up, passing out, being stretchered out in shock, etc, and plenty of affronted comment about the blasphemous depravity of the whole thing — hopes naturally ran high for a top evening out. Anticipation was further ramped up by creator/director Florentina Holzinger’s opinion that being a good dancer includes the ability to urinate on cue, plus the tempter for any Papist that the show represents “the trigger warning the Catholic Mass ought to have”.

Actual details were vague. Was it the live sex, the piercing, the promised bodily fluids, or the naked roller-skating nuns that had so distressed those poor Germans? It seemed important to find out — that, and whether this was any more than an adolescent provocation simply designed to wind up the wowserish old opera gang — or indeed to give them a helping hand into the next world: as Holzinger says, “People really do die in operas because they are fucking old, they are sitting down, their blood circulation shuts down and the air is probably mostly bad. I think it’s quite a nice death for an old person to die in an aria, actually.”

The godless Flemings took all this in their stride: none of the hoped-for protests appeared outside the Antwerp opera at Easter, and really you wonder what those sensitive Swabians were getting so het up about. Sancta is rather too baggy and long, naïve in parts, not uniformally well-performed, but apart from a couple of determined gross-out moments it’s basically good-natured, celebratory, evangelical — and totally sold out wherever it plays.

Nor is its supposed blasphemy so far from The Meaning of Life — though perhaps a teeny bit more earnestly Germanic, and occasionally leaden. In practice, the unbroken two-and-a-half hour show is pretty far from a nauseating endurance test, though it runs out of steam at various points, and pretty terminally for the last half hour.

It kicks off with a straight performance of Paul Hindemith’s half-hour source text, Sancta Susanna — written in 1922 and intended to upset everyone back then, though its power is somewhat diluted now, with our blunted sensibilities. Hindemith’s show (as written) culminates in the nun Susanna getting over-friendly with the Christ on the convent’s big crucifix after her suppressed hormones are jump-started by various springlike phenomena. The tremulous post-Debussy music was really nicely performed by soprano Cornelia Zink and the opera orchestra conducted by Marit Strindlund.

But of course everyone’s waiting breathlessly for what comes next: the big crucifix becomes the alarmingly precarious perch for a spot of energetic lesbian heavy petting, while up the back wall swarm a number of spidery participants, hanging in parodic crucifixion style. Ms Holzinger herself enacts the old human-as-bell-clapper routine above the stage. There are strobes and pounding techno. Everyone is naked. It’s a strong vision, doomy and portentous, but where are we going?

Into a rather discursive parody of the Catholic Mass, it turns out — complete with the actual chorus (demurely and nunnily clothed, mostly) singing a Bach Kyrie and other bits of the proper in various versions. But this is really the springboard for a number of excursions of varying interest. The best of these are the “two-foot pregnant lesbian Pope” charismatically performed by Saioa Alvarez Ruiz — often being hoiked around on the end of a mechanical lifter, and delivering positivist lectures — and an extended routine by Annina Machaz as a hippyish vaping Jesus, first seen on live-cam being denied entry to the opera house (hardly likely in this most welcoming of companies, actually, though more believable in Vienna and Germany) before bursting into the auditorium with sweary imprecations against obstructive jobsworths, followed by a slightly over extended stand-up gig, rather loosely written but performed with vim.

The whole thing comes over as a slightly hectoring kind of fun — as when the performers sit around delivering the kind of lectures familiar to parents of bolshy and censorious teens. Those longed-for skaters burst onto the half-pipe on stage and do their thing ebulliently to a bit of disco. There is an elaborate and determinedly transgressive bit of onstage surgery — filmed and projected in close-up — where a bit of skin is removed from one performer, fried and eaten (geddit?), which is the closest (along with some live piercing) the evening comes to trying to upset us. But what’s new? The Grand Guignol theatre in Paris was doing this stuff 130 years ago.

Musically it’s just as much of a mishmash: a couple of big production numbers (Cole Porter’s “Blow, Gabriel Blow!”, “It’s Raining Men”), some sub-John Adams stuff, a selection of cheesy quasi-religious tunes… and a parody of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s “Look at all my trials and tribulations” from Superstar — but at least they make a joke about not getting the rights to that. The last half-hour maunders on until the last item, an unexpected bit of survivalist boosterism delivered passionately by a trans person who’s had some impressive surgery done — and backed by the Rocky Horror tune “Don’t dream it, be it…” with the audience on its feet, singing along and beaming as if they were at a Billy Graham rally: the only really creepy bit of the whole show. 

Obviously, everything these days advertises itself as a “celebration of female sexuality”, but everyone on stage here was most definitely walking the walk, and it’s not too often you can say that. With strong echoes of Hair, Jerry Springer — The Opera, Python and dear old Frank N Furter, but very much its own diffuse vibe, at its best this had moments of iconoclasm and impious fun, delivered with pretty strong and positive energy. But I ask you, was it sisterly to pick on nuns, yet again? Sure, there’s a long tradition of using the sisters for naughty purposes, from Boccaccio to Ken Russell, and Ms Holzinger’s reasons seem fairly standard: “I just thought it was fucking camp, you know?” And to be fair, I’ve never seen them turn the other cheek quite so literally.