Turrini’s “Most Wonderful Day”: The Kammerspiele opens in stockings, but falls flat

The Kammerspiele starts its season with stockings, wigs and plenty of theatrical promise, but Peter Turrini’s “Most Wonderful Day” arrives on stage feeling unexpectedly lukewarm. In this reworking of Beaumarchais, director Anna Stiepani appears to have little idea what to do with the material at the Josefstadt’s second venue.

The production offers a lazy kind of wig magic. Susanne, played by Johanna Martini, longs for her marriage to Figaro, while Cherubin, portrayed by Marcello De Nardo, dreams of the possibilities of unrestricted sexual autonomy. The familiar figures from “The Marriage of Figaro”, including Figaro, Susanne, Cherubin and Count Almaviva, return in radically altered form.

Turrini wrote what is described as the most tender of his plays as a social revolutionary. To express his anger in 1972, he had to disguise it. He therefore rebuilt Beaumarchais’ comedy from the ground up, cleverly borrowing its characters from the costume warehouse of the Court and State Opera.

But these old figures no longer speak like comic operetta characters. In Turrini’s version, they talk like hardened cynics. They suffer not only from an advanced form of feudalism, but also from sexual troubles. The review’s verdict is that Stiepani’s production does little to unlock the force or sharpness of that transformation.