Love is the Drug: Michael Fuller admires the richness and complexity of Graham Vick’s ‘Tristan’ in Berlin

Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Vick, conducted Runnicles, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2016.

November 2016, Volume 10, Number 3, 71–3.

Tristan und Isolde is an extraordinarily rich work of art, and Graham Vick’s production for the Deutsche Oper Berlin, first unveiled in 2011, is an extraordinarily rich staging of it. The set consists of a long wall facing the audience, across the diagonals of the stage in the first two acts, and square-on in the third. Through doors in this wall various rooms can be seen: a kitchen, a bathroom, a room that serves as Isolde’s dressing-room. In the middle of the wall is an array of glass doors, and these serve as a threshold through which ‘other’ worlds may be seen: this allows for juxtapositions of this opera’s various binary opposites – interior and exterior, light and darkness, day and night, life and death – to be seen on either side of the glass. Various items of furniture remain through all three acts: a leather sofa, a kitchen table, a couple of hard chairs. An enormous lamp hanging from the flies is perpetually on the move, rising, falling, and illuminating different areas of the stage. The costumes are all contemporary.