Quartett (review)

I have long wondered about the collaboration between Heiner Müller and Robert Wilson. Müller's unflinching critique of political institutions and his own privilege appear at odds with the seemingly apolitical staging that is the bedrock of Wilson's theatre. Quartett, which goes a long way toward solving the mystery, uses the mise en scene to create binaries that give rise to a postmodern dialectics of estrangement between word and image.

A scrim covered the proscenium opening of the BAM Harvey Theatre on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. On the stage-left side, a reproduction of Frans Wouters's seventeenth-century painting, Le concert Champêtre, depicted four people engaged in alfresco music-making. Stage right, in front of the scrim, were a table and five chairs, all very rectilinear and contemporary. The sensuous two-dimensionality of the painting was in stark contrast to the hard puritanical edges of the three-dimensional furniture, a tension reflected in the history of the text. Müller's adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos's eighteenth-century novel Les Liaisons dangereuses was translated back into the French for its performance in the constructed world of Wilson's neo-expressionist imagery. Wilson's production of Quartett was a study of the tensions created in such dichotomies.

Müller's adaptation of Laclos's tale of predatory sexuality depicts two antagonistic lovers, Valmont and Merteuil, who conspire to seduce Mme. de Tourvel, a married woman and devout Catholic, and to deflower Cécile, Merteuil's niece, before she can marry. The four-character play, written for two actors, follows Valmont's successful but destructive attempts to bed the women. He and the Countess Merteuil, his agent provocateur, perform a pas de deux, enacting all of the other characters and giving voice to the value systems of those the people undermine. Quartett is a distillation of the original four-hundred-plus-page epistolary novel into a bare twelve pages. In it, Müller explores how powerful people use the deeply felt values of others to manipulate and ultimately ruin them. To retain his passionless power over others, Valmont uses religion against his victims, creating a cancer that seduces them into performing self-destructive acts.

Wilson's staging kept the spectator emotionally distanced. Two nonspeaking actors doubled as Valmont

Isabelle Huppert (Countess Merteuil) and Ariel Garcia Valdès (Valmont) in Quartett. (Photo: Stephanie Berger.)

Rachel Eberhart, Benoît Maréchal, Ariel Garcia Valdès (Valmont), and Isabelle Huppert (Countess Merteuil) in Quartett. (Photo: Stephanie Berger.)

and Merteuil (there were five actors altogether). A man and a woman served as detached rather than haunting doppelgängers, performing choreographed duets that refracted more than reflected the action. At times, they performed in relative isolation, separated from each other as well as the speaking actors; at other times, they interacted directly, serving as props for Valmont and Merteuil to lean on or caress. Typical of Wilson's theatrical worlds, the doubles did not communicate with each other, but created images that offered a sexless eroticism, suggesting connections—or not—with the words being spoken.

Wilson enveloped the premeditated plots of Valmont and Merteuil and the intertwining patterns of the doubles in a scenographically neo-expressionist atmosphere. The majority of the production took place in a stage volume of icy white light, with heavily saturated primary colors shuttered into hard-edged forms spotlighting the speaking actors: typically blue for Merteuil, and red for Valmont, who wore white makeup to keep the color pure. The set pieces, with the exception of the opening scene, were either black or lit in silhouette. Through this system of stark contrasts, Wilson established the binary, the basis of the dialectic, as a motif. The minimal sets, almost without exception, divided the stage into two parts: a batten with gauze curtains was flown in, creating a diagonal from downstage right to upstage left; and a large sphere in the middle of the stage split...