Orpheus and Eurydice have spent a long life together and have grown old side-by-side. Now Eurydice has died. Orpheus finds himself alone in his apartment, isolating himself from his environment. Only his grown-up son Apollo tries to maintain contact with the increasingly inaccessible man.
An old melody begins to haunt Orpheus’s mind, taking him back to his youth. Long-deceased friends appear and celebrate the wedding of Eurydice and Orpheus. But the veil of aging covers all; the celebration turns into a funeral procession. Orpheus’s apartment transforms into the underworld, becoming a hell for him. The narrow spaces expand into an endless landscape in which the frail man finds himself helpless. The river Styx begins to flood the apartment. On its shore a lost diver sits, whom the ship’s crew may well have presumed dead. Searching for an exit, Orpheus sings out into the void, but only the echo responds. Will a ship come to ferry him across the waters?
Orpheus as the eternal myth of aging—within the 60 square meters of the apartment next door and in the inner infinity of loneliness.
Director: Maria Chagina
Set and costume design: Anna Agafonova
Dramaturgy: Sören Sarbeck
Maria Chagina and Sören Sarbeck have been working together since their studies at the August Everding Theatre Academy in Munich, where they developed the opera Invitation to a Beheading together. For L’Orfeo, the stage and costume designer Anna Agafonova joins their team. Together they are looking for a music theatre that draws on everyday experiences and is located at the transition between drama and opera.
Anna Agafonova graduated from the Moscow Art Theatre School and has worked in various theatres in Russia, including the Gogol Centre and the Moscow Youth Theatre. She currently lives and works in Israel.
After graduating from the Moscow GITIS, Maria Chagina staged Orff’s The Moon in Yakutsk and an evening about Carola Neher for the human rights organisation Memorial in Moscow before emigrating to Germany. She is a fellow of the Akademie Musiktheater heute.
Dramaturg and librettist Sören Sarbeck is currently engaged at Theater Lübeck after a traineeship at Bayerische Staatsoper.
Photos (c) Susanne Hassler-Smith
