“I have received many positive comments about how, in this production of The nose, Àlex Ollé has managed to bring together Gógol and Shostakóvich in a very contemporary way”. Peter de Caluwé says it in the middle of the bustle that reigns in that Grand Foyer de La Monnaie where, under a dim nineteenth-century light and the roof from 1700 in which the house was built, opening nights are celebrated by making the best wine flow.
The mayor of the most disruptive opera house in Europe – it was here that the spark exploded that gave rise to a country, Belgium, in 1830, when the bourgeois rebelled against the king of the Netherlands, incited by a plot – he has distinguished himself by giving priority to the combative stagings that reflect the current times of change.
A worthy successor to Gerard Mortier, De Caluwé has known how to maintain since 2007 this beacon of newly created productions –two or three per season, no less– and of theatrical productions that approach the repertoire with another vision, sometimes even falling into delirious dramaturgy.
This is not the case of Ollé in this humorous The Nose that Shostakovich composed in 1930 based on the story by Nikolai Gogol. And which is being performed for the first time at La Monnaie –co-produced together with the Copenhagen Opera–, with Gergely Madaras conducting and an irregular Scott Hendricks as the lead, whom the orchestra covers from time to time.
The furero deviates from the norm, yes, but in order to maintain the spirit of social criticism that this absurd story has about an official with social aspirations who loses his nose... -his barber cuts it off- and with it all possibility to appear in society. The usual team of Àlex Ollé, with the playwright Susana Gómez as a collaborator, flees here from laughter. It does not intend to highlight on stage that hilarious absurdity that is the piece, as Barrie Kosky did, among others, a few months ago at the Teatro Real, but rather to focus the audience on the present.
“We didn't want the clown thing, the humor here is already carried by 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 he ends up criticizing his own time, Stalin's. What is brought to the present moment fits over any demagogue populist politician: Trump, Putin, Erdogan…”
For this purpose, Ollé has three dramaturgical pillars. The three-to-a-room official is a powerful politician here. And if, according to the story, he goes to the newspaper to place an ad about his missing nose, the greatest value without which he cannot socialize, on the Monnaie stage the politician gives a press conference. He has lost something sausage-shaped, the penis without which it seems to him that he is doomed to be a wretch. His biggest nightmare is being surrounded by the lumpen, the outsiders... And people don't even listen to him, he throws objects at them.
“We don't want the nose to be a character but rather a symbol: status. And we show the protagonist as who he is... someone capable of saying about women that they are "some chickens", as he 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 wings. that allows us to create, like charcoals, common faces of today, war refugees from Ukraine that emerge from the fog that Gogol speaks of in his story. And the costumes by Lluc Castells, inspired by the street photos of Suzanne Stein, who photographs the marginality of New York, generates that group of people whom he does not caricature. The chorus is well educated, its characters are not grotesque, they just lead a hard life, and surely sad. The reality brought to 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, revalidates the applause of the public in Brussels, where it seems to be more of a prophet than in his land. De Caluwé (Termonde, 1963) looks at him satisfied. Although there is a shadow in his gaze. The Belgian playwright will be replaced in 2025 by the former director of the Liceu Christina Scheppelmann, a very different profile from his, carved above all in that lyrical world where voices prioritize.
