Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz,
Berlin

DIE FRUCHTFLIEGE / THE FRUIT FLY

“At the turn of the millennium, so much knowledge through such a tiny and peculiar creature.”

In terms of the history of our evolution, we have reached the point where humans are able to destroy themselves, at least as the highest vertebrates originating through heterosexual intercourse. Love is an additional feeling that arose out of the fact that human offspring need so much longer than other vertebrates to become autonomous.

Following his staging of Tristan und Isolde in Bayreuth, Christoph Marthaler was asked about the timeliness of the theme of love and death. He replied: “Maybe today nobody dies of love anymore; maybe love itself is dead.”

In Die Fruchtfliege (Fruit Fly), his new production at theVolksbühne, Christoph Marthaler has asked a group of researchers to work on the phenomenon of love, one that is absent from today’s life. The researchers know that their body cells remember the whole history of their genre, all past feelings, how they originated and how they once ended. Researching is a lonely job, even when the object of study is love.

How did love originate and how did it disappear again? Most of all: where has the genetic information of such feelings gone? Such are the questions posed by these lonely researchers devoid of memories. Few other feelings have generated such strong cultural values and social rituals. Seduction, bonding, l’amour fou, passions, friendships.

The opera deals exclusively with the dramatization of feelings. Alexander Kluge has called it “a powerhouse of feelings.” Is it possible to rebuild the passion contained in the music of a genre of the past to draw conclusions about as yet unknown genetic information that may enable us to understand the present? Why do researchers study the genetic material of all vertebrates – including those of humans and the species that has developed from them – by observing drosophilae, also known as fruit flies? “Upon researching physical connections between genes and behavior, fruit flies have provided us with many preliminary answers –time, love, memory observed through an insect’s compound eye.”

The Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in the centre of Berlin has existed since 1914. It was established as a result of a grassroots movement. Erwin Piscator, in the 1920s, and Benno Besson, in the 1970s, had a enormous influence on this theatre. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Castorf became director general and turned it into perhaps the most successful, and certainly the most controversial theatre in reunified Germany. With its paradoxical objectives to be elitist and populist, eccentric and appealing to the masses, it simultaneously radiates a mood of awakening, but also of the awareness of futility; it tears down the classical limits of the theatre, but also confirms them in a reflective way.