Where is Peter Sellars drifting to?

In 1993 the director presented an adaptation of Aeschylus' tragedy The Persians at the Edinburgh International Festival.

It met with a strong response – albeit for bad reasons.

Against the background of the First Gulf War, the Americans transformed the Greeks, threatened with annihilation but ultimately victorious, into compatriots, and the Persians, who were militarily superior but ultimately defeated, into Iraqis.

The whole thing was colorful, bold and filled with that primitive anti-Americanism that privileged US citizens like to cultivate.

Since then, the former director wolf has eaten chalk, but above all he has drunk hectoliters of chai tea with oat milk.

In recent years he has appeared - especially on the opera stage - as a good-natured author of soft religious decal productions.

His latest coup, "Roman de Fauvel" at the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet, now combines both facets of Sellars' directorial approach: the snarling denunciation and the mildly smiling moralizing.

The source material is fascinating: the medieval “Roman de Fauvel”.

Probably begun in 1310 and completed in 1314, this contemporary satire in allegory form by the poet Gervais du Bus, a notary in the office of Philip IV the Handsome, has survived in thirteen manuscripts.

The best-known of these, a luxurious codex in the French National Library, inserts 169 song pieces between the well over 3,000 octosyllables.

The title and anti-hero of the novel is the hoofed animal (donkey or horse) Fauvel, whose names form the first letters of six vices.

Thanks to Lady Fortuna, the creature makes it from the stable to the palace, where the king and pope caress it.

Fauvel asks for Fortuna's hand, but she marries her maid to him.

The descendants of the two bring all of France under their godless yoke, but in the end the restoration of the world order by heavenly powers becomes apparent.

Sellars makes almost nothing out of this attractive material.

He completely evacuates the visual world of the novel.

In the aforementioned "Manuscrit français 146" there are detailed descriptions of the palace that Philippe le Bel had built on the Parisian Île de la Cité.

In addition, seventy-seven miniatures with figures in all imaginable costumes and in the most diverse postures.

Not that the director should have adopted this visual universe one-to-one, but it would have been his job to invent a contemporary equivalent.

Instead, Sellars shows what he has in front of his nose at home: videos of forest fires in California, projected for almost the full hundred minutes of the game on a giant screen that covers the entire stage background.

Treetops suffocating in clouds of smoke, blazing clearings, burning bushes, from near and far, with a fixed or moving camera – the metaphor (which is implemented in a rather blurred way in terms of image technology) for the state of the world at the beginning of the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries is so simple that no one explanation needed.

Condensed Old French

Just as little as one gets to see the hoof of a mythical creature in this "Fauvel", one hears its spicy, strange language just as little.

Sellars had the old French original evaporated into English texts by the poet Alice Goodman, the French translation of which Pauline Cheviller recites from the off.

Fauvel is only mentioned in passing, instead it is about the representatives of the Fortune 500 list, the Unabomber, the Obamas and the storming of the Capitol.

In short: the whole thing is decidedly anachronistic and even more decidedly American.

What remains are the twelve vocal pieces that sound between these texts.

With seven singers from the Sequentia ensemble, you will find competent interpreters.

In 1991, the same group of singers showed with an album dedicated to Philippe de Vitry that this repertoire can be made to sound even more colourful.

Male voices and medieval instruments were also used in the aforementioned recording.

Not so in the Châtelet, which creates a certain monotony.

Especially since a full hour passes after the first motet.

As artfully simple as all the monodic ballads and lais are in themselves, they make the time grow long in a never-ending sequence.

For long stretches, Sellars can't think of anything better than having the singers double the text gesturally: with hand signals and rows of rings,

Devotional poses and burial pantomimes.

The whole thing tastes like a mix of communion wafers, wokeness and Californian spirituality - there is a lack of umami.