I 've never known a festival so full of connecting threads. Every show programmed by curators Hortense Archambault and Victor Baudriller adds to the spiderweb in your head: economic crises stare down revolutionary ideals; globalisation locks horns with environmental concerns and various forms of inequality. A degree commentary on today's world emerges over three weeks and 45 shows. One could, I suppose, draw parallels between Chekhov's would-be playwright Treplyov, who defies popular tastes to seek truth through his art, and this production.
But Nauzyciel is more concerned with tipping the play's unrequited loves into full-blown melodrama. Gallais wears a hunchbacked coat to suggest Treplyov's self-disgust at his inability to win Nina's love.
With sighing and soliloquising, Nauzyciel stretches its 60 pages to four excruciating hours of over-acting and extreme enunciation. I swear one actor managed to squeeze four syllables out of the word "nuit". Worse, though, is the sheer literalism. Riccardo Hernandez's design might be stunning, but starting the cast in seagull masks and making the stage a metallic cliff face says less than nothing.
He cuts a couple of peripheral characters, but leaves the plot intact. The spa town's water system is still polluted; the town's authorities still try to hush the problem up for economic reasons, despite the idealist Dr Stockmann's increasing protests.
Here, Stockmann and pals become hip young professionals, churning out breezy Gnarls Barkley and David Bowie covers. For them, work is an extension of leisure and pay cheques go towards luxury items. Ostermeier's major surgery comes when Stockmann's final public address to the town, after the local paper has blocked his article about the pollution, is switched for a genuine French anti-capitalist manifesto called The Coming Insurrection : "The economy is not in crisis. The economy is the crisis," he bellows.
