After the success of the
Barber of Seville in 2014, Italian director Damiano Michieletto
is returning to the Paris Opera on October 4 with a production
of Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saens.
Since his time at Milan's La Scala, Paris opera director
Stephane Lissner is known as a risk-taker who is never satisfied
with standard shows. And Michieletto's work, whether successful
or provoking storms of criticism, is never standard.
The last example was opposition from the London public to a
gang rape scene in his production of William Tell. Despite
criticism that the scene was gratuitous, he refused to cut it,
saying that it drew attention to the plight of women in warfare.
As in William Tell, this modern version of Samson and
Delilah includes a scene of one people oppressing another.
"I focused on the concept of slavery - I was interested in
portraying suffering, because in suffering we are all the same.
What you see therefore is a conflict between one who is treated
as a slave, an object, and another who perpetrates the
violence," the Venetian director said.
He describes Delilah as a woman who is "brutalised by the
society in which she lives, devoted to possession and
domination, and who completes a course: she has a realisation
and she feels responsible for the destruction of Samson, the man
who abandoned everything for her," he said.
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