Review: In ‘Amour,’ Putting a Palme d’Or Winner Onstage

The German-language stage adaptation, by Henkel and the dramaturg Tobias Schuster, hews intently to the French screenplay. At the identical time, they make use of methods to defamiliarize the piece. The dialogue is heightened by frequent, usually uncanny repetition. And lots of the script’s stage instructions are learn out loud by two actors, Joyce Sanhá and Christian Löber, whose limber performances — as narrators, nurses and different characters — add to the manufacturing’s anxious, off-kilter power.

Henkel’s biggest gamble is together with a twelve-person refrain of nonprofessional extras. Each of them is outdated, infirm or in mourning, and, though they don’t converse onstage, they’ve written shifting testimonies about residing with well being circumstances, or dropping family members to sickness which might be recited as monologues by the primary solid. In the mistaken directorial fingers, this type of intervention may simply have curdled into sentimentality. Here, nonetheless, the emotional cost of those testimonies is balanced by understatement and restraint. By an analogous token, the manufacturing’s depiction and dialogue of euthanasia, whereas typically stunning, resists moralizing.

Hovering someplace between the solid of extras and the primary performers is the actress Nine Manthei, a bit of lady who acts as an ambiguous middleman. Is she a defending angel? The personification of Anne’s soul? Along with Bach’s skillful efficiency, Manthei’s poise and onstage presence suggests a double publicity of Anne as an outdated lady and a baby.

“Old age might be tragic, but it is not individual,” we hear Haneke’s voice say in an excerpt from an interview about “Amour” that performs throughout the manufacturing.

More than a decade in the past, Haneke employed his formal austerity and emotional restraint to immerse us in a single aged couple’s tragedy. But the place movie encourages realism, theater can embrace allegory and abstraction. With her delicate, at instances idiosyncratic, strategy to this identical materials, Henkel makes use of her theatrical artistry to succeed in the common.

Amour
Through Aug. 10 on the Salzburg Festival, in Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at.