Drug Party

If you found some teenaged boys raised on Breaking Bad and summer blockbusters, then gave them some money to produce an opera, the results might be something like the Deutsche Oper’s disbelief-inducing new production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail. It wasn’t that the staging was puerile (it was) or offensive (it tried); it wasn’t that it failed to understand the difference between erotic and tawdry; it wasn’t even that the dialogue between numbers had been discarded in favour of a lame attempt at profanity-laden action movie banter. It was the fact that beneath its contrived provocation and its riffs on pop culture there was nothing. No plot, no structure, no depth, no emotions, no opera. It is rare, at least in Berlin, to leave an opera house feeling that one’s time has been so thoroughly wasted.

Theatre director Rodrigo…