“I have received many positive comments about how, in this production of El Nas, Àlex Ollé has managed to bring together Gogol and Shostakovich in a very contemporary way”. This is what Peter de Caluwe says in the midst of the bustle that reigns in that Grand Foyer of La Monnaie where, under a dim nineteenth-century light and the ceiling of the 1700 in which the house was built, the opening nights are celebrated by running the best wine .
The intendant of the most disruptive opera house in Europe – here was the spark that gave rise to a country, Belgium, in 1830, when the bourgeois rebelled against the king of the Netherlands, incited by a plot – has distinguished itself by prioritizing combative stagings that reflect today’s changing times.
A worthy successor of Gerard Mortier, De Caluwe has been able to maintain since 2007 this beacon of newly created productions – two or three per season, no more and no more – and theatrical productions that approach the repertoire with a different vision, sometimes failing even in delusional drama.
This is not the case with Ollé in this playful El Nas that Shostakovich composed in 1930 based on Nikolai Gogol’s story. And that it is performed for the first time at La Monnaie – co-produced together with the Copenhagen Opera –, with Gergely Madaras on the baton and an irregular Scott Hendricks as the protagonist, whom the orchestra covers from time to time.
The furer deviates from the norm, yes, but in favor of maintaining the spirit of social criticism that this absurd story has about a civil servant with social aspirations who loses his nose… – his barber cuts it off – and with that every possibility to present himself in society. The usual team of Àlex Ollé, with playwright Susana Gómez as a collaborator, runs away from laughter here. It does not aim to emphasize on stage the hilarious absurdity that is the piece, as Barrie Kosky did, among others, a few months ago at the Teatro, but to concentrate the audience in the present.
“We didn’t want the clown roll, the humor here already comes from the music. But the piece is actually very critical: Gogol makes a social satire of his tsarist moment. And Shostakovich wants to do the same, but ends up criticizing his own era, that of Stalin. Which transferred to the present moment fits any demagogue populist politician: Trump, Putin, Erdogan…”.
For this purpose, Ollé has three dramaturgical pillars. The stay-at-home official is here a powerful politician. And if, according to the story, he goes to the newspaper to place an ad about his lost nose, the most important value without which he cannot relate in society, the politician holds a press conference on the stage of La Monnaie. He has lost something in the shape of a sausage: the penis without which he seems to be doomed to be miserable. His worst nightmare is to be surrounded by lumpen, outsiders… And people don’t even listen to him, they give him objects.
“We don’t want the nose to be a character, but rather a symbol: status. And the protagonist, we show him as he is… someone capable of saying of women that they are ‘chickens’, as it appears in the story. He is not a victim, but someone despicable”, comments Ollé.
The next pillar is erected by Alfons Flores, with a scenography based on 2 mm iron balls, which allows to create, like charcoal, common faces of today, war refugees from Ukraine that emerge from the fog he speaks of Gogol in his tale. And the figurines of Lluc Castells, inspired by the street photos of Suzanne Stein, who photographs the marginality of New York, generate that group of people who are not caricatured. The heart is well drawn, his characters are not grotesque, they just lead a hard, and certainly sad, life. Reality brought to the scene.
After his happy experiences with Le grand macabre, Oedipe, Un ballo in maschera and the new Frankenstein by Max Grey, Ollé, the co-founder of La Fura dels Baus and current artist-in-residence at the Liceu, reconfirms the applause of the public in Brussels· les, where he seems to be more of a prophet than at home. De Caluwe (Termonde, 1963) looks at him with satisfaction. Although there is a shadow in this look. The Belgian playwright will be replaced in 2025 by the former director of the Liceu Christina Scheppelmann, a very different profile to his, plowed above all in that lyrical world in which voices are prioritized.
