Casting Trump as a 21st-century Brechtian villain

One cannot reasonably hope that Julius Ceasar or Henry VIII or even Richard Nixon for that matter might be making headlines as a new production of an opera about them is being staged, but a one-off mounting of Bernhard Lang's Playing Trump at Ostrava Days (Staatsoper Hamburg gave the world premiere in 2021) was opportune to the point of spectacle, made all the more surreal, personally, by being one of only a handful of Americans – most if not all besides myself performing in the festival – to bear witness to this tragicomic farce based on the 45th American president's tragicomic term in the White House. 

Lang's opera isn't an attempt to add to the indictments served to the former president of late. Rather, it presents Trump in his own words. The libretto, compiled and crafted by Dieter Sperl, is pulled entirely from English and German news reports. While soprano Donatienne Michel-Dansac's Trump soapboxing in German Sprechgesang was somewhat disarming, parallels to German nationalist leaders were likely unintended.

Michel-Dansac was great in a role that could easily have been played as pantomime clown or Disney villain. Her swagger was on point and her leering at walk-on fashion models was convincing without the discomfiture that may have come with a male actor. Indeed, the satiric edge to having a woman portray the infamous misogynist was suggested without being forced. Like much that could have turned to tiny ham-fistedness, the sardonic edge was done by implication.

Lang's music leans toward rock and cabaret without committing to the forms. The composer's past includes time booked with death metal bands and improv groups and he used such syntaxes in a score that often set partial themes and then looped them, not digitally but in the playing of the saxophone, keyboard, guitar, drums and percussion onstage ensemble. The monologs, too, often repeated on themselves, bearing down on such phrases as “rigged witch hunt” and “Russian hoax”. The effect was sometimes like Brechtian glitches, other times darkly cinematic. A bit of infectious surf rock accompanied Michel-Dansac taking the stage which, like the whole of the hour, was played like a campaign rally, truly where the problematic protagonist shines. Director Jiří Nekvasil played up the stumping with a festive set, including MAGA hats for the band. 

If pride does indeed goeth before a fall, Playing Trump stopped short of giving such satisfaction. The opera ended with cardboard boxes bearing presidential seals being stacked by the models while our hero ascended above the Antonín Dvořák Theatre stage in an oversized chair draped in a flag. Perhaps a future Rudy Giuliani opera will provide some vindication.  

Kurt's press trip was funded by Ostrava New Music Days