Out to Shock: A gruelling Wagnerian extravaganza has its moments, writes Graeme Feggetter

Review of Tragedy of a Friendship (music by Richard Wagner and Moritz Eggert), directed Fabre, Lille, 2013.

March 2014, Volume 8, Number 1, 71–2.

This was one of the most bizarre celebrations of the Wagner bicentenary year. The programme biography of director Jan Fabre revealed that he started with performance theatre in the late seventies and his style has clear relationships with Julian Beck’s Living Theatre. Beck had multiple problems with the US courts over nudity, but many rather more shocking events can now be staged with impunity. I remember that when Beck brought his company to the Roundhouse in the late sixties, the audience could move freely around the auditorium with the house lights up. Jan Fabre resolutely kept the house lights down throughout the 190 minutes that this performance lasted. It was not for the faint-hearted.