THÉÂTRE DE VIDY AV. E.-H. JAQUES-DALCROZE 5 CH-1007 LAUSANNE Press service Sandra Scalea T +41 (0)21 619 45 25 [email protected] Assistant Constance Chaix T +41 (0)21 619 45 67 [email protected] vidy.ch NICOLAS STEMANN Nathan !? after Nathan the Wise by G.E. Lessing and Crassier/Bataclan by Elfriede Jelinek Nathan !? © Samuel Rubio NICOLAS STEMANN NATHAN !? 2 NATHAN !? Direction : Nicolas Stemann Traduction and dramaturgy : Mathieu Bertholet Scenography : Katrin Nottrodt Music : Waël Koudaih (Rayess Bek) Costumes : Marysol del Castillo Video : Claudia Lehmann Assistant to the direction : Nora Bussenius Intern assistant to the direction : Mathias Brossard Intern assistant costumes : Giulia Rossini Decor construction : Ateliers du Théâtre de Vidy With : Lorry Hardel Lara Katthabi Mounir Margoum Serge Martin Elios Noël Véronique Nordey Laurent Papot Lamya Regragui and two musicians : Waël Koudaih (Rayess Bek) Yann Pittard Production : Théâtre de Vidy Coproduction : MC93- Maison de la Culture de la Seine St-Denis, Bobigny Théâtre National de Strasbourg Théâtre National de Bretagne Bonlieu Scène nationale Annecy et La Bâtie-Festival de Genève dans le cadre du programme INTERREG France-Suisse 2014-2020 With the support of: Fonds d’Insertion pour Jeunes Artistes Dramatiques, D.R.A.C. et Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur L’Arche is the theatral agent of Elfriede Jelinek Creation on September 14th 2016 at the Vidy Theatre NICOLAS STEMANN NATHAN !? 3 PRESENTATION Nicolas Stemann has already directed Nathan the Wise, Lessing’s well-known masterpiece, along with a “secondary drama” commissioned from Elfriede Jelinek (at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in 2009). Seven years later, in a Europe afflicted by a brand of terrorism marked by religious ideology and violently confronted with the questioning of its models of integration and tolerance, he reworks these two texts in a new production. Nathan’s Promise A long time ago, Nathan’s wife and their children died in a fire. Only Nathan survived. Nathan was therefore condemned to survive in spite of the emptiness and absence. Lessing thus describes the recovery of a wounded man’s dignity and faith in humanity. The German author starts his drama with a new fire that destroys Nathan’s home again – another ordeal for the old man. For Nathan, the recovery of life occurs through his love for his adoptive daughter Recha. The amazing thing is, Nathan the Jew has adopted a Christian girl, despite the fact that it was Christians that caused the fire and destroyed his family. Nathan educates young Recha as though she were his own daughter. It is through her that he becomes himself, that he accomplishes who he is, that he becomes Nathan the Wise and overcomes what appears insurmountable: the repetition of history. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise thus opposes the surpassing of the self with the affirmation of an identity: strive to be better, even if it means that this is only a rudimentary hope, a belief, rather than conform to set behaviours determined in advance by habits and dogmas. This belief in goodness resonates particularly well with our era, as crusades are again justifying that houses be destroyed by fire. Nathan the Wise is a promise: humans can be free, free and dignified, free of any influence, any dependency, or any other person. Each individual can be both him or herself and different, linked to everyone and to any other individual by the simple fact of being human. This is a promise. And this promise also identifies a demand: the pressing need for an education of humanity. Nicolas Stemann commissioned Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel Prize for Literature 2004) to write a complement to Lessing’s text. She wrote Slag Heap and Bataclan that comment and extend the original text. NICOLAS STEMANN NATHAN !? 4 «NATHAN THE WISE» BY G.-E. LESSING SYNOPSIS 11187. Jerusalem, conquered by the crusades, has been taken over by the Sultan Saladin. The old Jewish merchant Nathan returns from a business trip. His daughter Recha has just been saved from her burning home by a young Templar; himself spared by Saladin for his resemblance to his brother Assad. Nathan, who had already lost his wife and his sons in a fire, makes a vow of gratitude to this young knight, who refuses it, protesting that he was only doing his duty. In the meantime, Saladin is ruined by his philanthropic charity, even though he needs funds to continue the war and protect the city. He convokes and questions the rich merchant Nathan on the three monotheisms – of which only one, logically, must speak the truth – hopeful that the Jew’s attachment to his religion will enable him to take control of his goods. Nathan responds with the parable of the rings, taken from Boccace : A father owns a ring handed down from generation to generation and that is able to make the wearer agreeable to God and men. He can’t decide which of his three sons to give it to. He has two copies made and pretends to give to each of them the true ring. Once the father has died, the sons accuse one another of lying. A judge convinces them to make up their minds through the facts: the one who holds the real ring will inevitably be the most beloved of the three. Nathan compares the parable to the three religions : the true religion will be the one that makes humans good – religion is thus concerned with goodness, and not with dogma or truth. Meanwhile, the Templar has fallen in love with Recha, Nathan’s daughter, who he saved. But Nathan, despite the fact that he was just preaching tolerance, seems to distrust this potential union... The knight thus learns from the servant that Recha was adopted by Nathan and that her parents were Christians : he goes to ask the advice of the patriarch of Jerusalem. In spite of his caution, the patriarch condemns the Jew Nathan to the pyre for having raised a Christian girl in the false religion... before a monk brings proof that Recha and the Templar are brother and sister and that they are the children of Assad, Saladin’s converted brother – a fact that Nathan did not want to admit and that Saladin was unaware of... Published in 1779, Nathan the Wise is Lessing’s last play. The Ring Parable, at the centre of the drama, is considered to be one of the key texts of the Enlightenment period philosophy concerning tolerance. ERIC VAUTRIN NICOLAS STEMANN NATHAN !? 5 JELINEK AND STEMANN READERS OF LESSING TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF TOLERANCE Lessing’s story is a kind of dissertation read aloud – full of words, thoughts and utopia and virtually devoid of action. In a few short monologues that can be inserted within Lessing’s drama, Elfriede Jelinek introduces what the German author had put aside, what he had neglected in favour of his moral, ethical and idealistic line of thought: the states of the body, desire and flesh. In Nathan the Wise, the desire of the two young people, Recha and the Templar, is literally annulled in favour of the stability of the family: thus, in Lessing’s idealism, tolerance and fraternity require the sacrifice of individual desires. In this sense, Nathan can also be read as a tragedy of love rendered impossible in favour of social peace. Nathan, a convinced and convincing idealist who values mutual goodness rather than identification with dogmas, wants to have a house built in order to thwart the catastrophic fate of his home. Jelinek has the protagonists state that this home will have a basement, a reserved and hidden space, crammed with everything that does not respond to his ideal of tolerance – that is, all forms of desire and conflict – recalling, by reappropriation, the Fritzl affair: the Austrian man who had locked his own daughter in a basement for 24 years, raping her and producing 7 children. She thus shows that while utopia helps humans to forge their destinies, it also closes their eyes, and it thus maintains the conditions for its own impossibility, by not taking what constitutes human nature into account. Jelinek then compares faith and money, as similar systems of belief, making the capitalist economy the fourth monotheism. Slag Heap is thus presented as “an exciting journey through the history of the World, from ancient times to German idealism, the Holocaust and contemporary history, with its times of war and crisis” – a journey that comes to measure the humanist ideal against the yardstick of contemporary finance, questioning Lessing from the perspective of our lives today, questioning the pertinence of the Enlightenment’s legacy. Slag Heap, named after the mountains of waste accumulated by mining operations, highlights the contradictions of Lessing’s drama, by opposing what he left out – by confronting Lessing’s idealism and elegant language, and the Aujkldrung along with it, with the cruel violence of reality. Placed side-by-side and interwoven, Lessing’s and Jelinek’s text mutually enlighten and criticise each other, providing a sounding board for the paradoxes of our era regarding tolerance, integration, idealism and Europe’s heritage from the Enlightenment. However, it is not a question of either mocking the idea of fraternity or contenting ourselves with nihilism: the precision of Jelinek’s critique and Stemann’s theatrical sequences calls us instead to resist the urge to flee conflicts and aims to uphold lucidity against a ‘holdall’ humanism that masks the cynicism and futility of hollow, moralising discourses that are tirelessly repeated. Together, they seek to compare thoughts and acts, discourses and politics, the analyses of the past and the choices of the present.