Burning Down the House: Michael Fuller finds Richard Jones’s Munich ‘Lohengrin’ still packs a punch

Review of Lohengrin, directed Jones, conducted Koenigs, Munich, 2019.

March 2020, Volume 14, Number 1, 67–70.

‘The human body as a whole is pictured by the dream-imagination as a house’, wrote Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In the tenth lecture of his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916–17) he elaborated: ‘The one typical – that is regular – representation of the human figure as a whole is a house […]. The houses with smooth walls are men, the ones with projections and balconies that one can hold on to are women.’ This image of a house, and specifically of a house which represents the person, the hopes and the dreams of Elsa, is present throughout Richard Jones’s Munich production of Lohengrin, thereby throwing the focus of the tragedy unswervingly onto its put-upon female lead.