Orphée aux Enfers

production
Opéra bouffe in four acts by Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880). Eurydice despises the music of Orpheus, turns her back on her bourgeois existence and travels with her lover Pluto to the Underworld. The gods, bored by their own wealthy and powerful lives, decide to follow her. Their appearance in the Underworld unleashes an extravagant and liberating celebration, culminating in the euphoric outburst of the “Galop infernal” — the famous cancan.

design
We take Offenbach’s concept as our point of departure: a satirical opéra bouffe about the morals and manners of the Second Empire, disguised as a parody of an opera based on an ancient Greek myth. To this already complex, layered structure, we add yet another layer: a 21st-century perspective. As eclectic as the music and libretto, so too is our approach to the design. As eclectic as the music and the libretto, the design follows a similarly approach. The set evolves from a classical 19th-century stage picture in the first act to a bold, ultra-neoclassical mix of styles and movement in the fourth. While Eurydice is initially trapped within the 19th-century morality of ‘public opinion’, the visual language likewise remains bound to traditional scene changes: panels with two-dimensional images of classical landscapes and trompe-l’œil effects. Gradually, this framework is broken open — in parallel with Eurydice’s liberation from the men around her — culminating in the fourth act, where hell quite literally breaks loose, in the best possible sense: as a celebration of freedom.