ABSTRACT
Back in 2007, the French theatre director Patrice Chéreau staged Leoš Janáček’s From the House of the Dead for the Vienna Festival. The opera, based on Dostoevsky’s novel, is set in a labour camp, and although Chéreau wanted his staging to speak to twenty-first-century concerns about the effects of imprisonment, he also insisted that his production didn’t ‘need to put the prisoners into orange uniforms’ in order to address the anxieties about incarceration that internment procedures at Guantánamo Bay had unleashed.1 Chéreau’s argument, that the iconic orange suits worn by detainees at Guantánamo had become a lazy token gesture made by theatre practitioners who wanted their productions to engage with the serious implications of the strategies adopted by the governments which have formulated and prosecuted the so-called ‘war on terror’, came in the wake of a series of high-profile dramatic performances in which these distinctive uniforms had been deployed as a kind of easy shorthand; they had appeared, for instance, as a gratuitous flourish at the close of an otherwise intelligent production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that Simon McBurney directed at London’s National Theatre in 2004.2
In the opera houses of the world, however, Chéreau’s suggestion has been studiously ignored ever since he made it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, directors of Beethoven’s Fidelio – the story of the political prisoner Florestan and his struggle against a corrupt and repressive regime – have been unable to resist the temptation to ‘update’ by deploying this simple visual device: the orange uniforms have appeared in entirely separate productions at London’s Holland Park Opera in 2010, at Melbourne Opera in 2012, and at Seattle Opera in 2013. In 2014, however, not only did the English Touring Opera production of Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden’s Paul Bunyan end with characters being given Guantánamo suits, but in the same year they also reappeared in a revival of the work with which the previous chapter has been largely concerned: Handel’s Hercules.3
