Der goldene Drache

SYNOPSIS

A young Chinese man with excruciating toothache works with four other Chinese in the kitchen of the Thai-Chinese-Vietnamese convenience restaurant ‚The Golden Dragon‘. His colleagues tear out his decayed tooth with the aid of pipe tongs as the young man cannot visit a dentist without valid official documents. His family had urged him to travel to Germany illegally to search for his sister who is also working somewhere without legal papers. The tooth lands in the Thai soup. A grandfather and his granddaughter are conversing on the balcony. The granddaughter has become pregnant unintentionally and quarrels with her boyfriend. Two stewardesses are eating in the ‚Golden Dragon‘. One of the two, Inga, finds the tooth in her Thai soup. The grocer forces a young Chinese girl into prostitution; the older man and the younger man, incensed by the unwanted pregnancy of his girlfriend both take advantage of her services. She is wounded – and perhaps killed? The young Chinese man bleeds to death in the kitchen of the ‚Golden Dragon‘. His colleagues wrap him up in a hanging tapestry and through him into the river which then carries him way – back home to China as the young man himself imagined in his final dream? Inga throws the tooth into the river. Additionally interwoven between all these scenes is the story of the grasshopper which has not stored any stocks of food and asks an ant to feed him through the winter. The ant agrees and first forces the grasshopper to work free of charge and then as a prostitute, all of which the grasshopper endures until one of her feelers is torn out by an old ant (an older man) and she is then severely injured by a young ant (a younger man) – ‚broken, utterly ruined‘.

COMMENTARY

22 scenes, 22 events or fragments of events which are interwoven, connected by a common theme or apparently have nothing to do with one another. Three female and two male singers act out a total of 17 roles, often typecast against their age, gender or vocal range. The tenor for example sings and plays the role of ‚younger man‘ swiftly followed by a change to the role of grandfather, a young Asian man, the waitress, the grasshopper and the Chinese aunt. This kaleidoscope of snapshots of greater and lesser catastrophes and the panoptic of bizarre and simultaneously shocking and touching sketches of different character types is all held together by the Thai-Chinese-Vietnamese convenience restaurant ‚The Golden Dragon‘ which gave its name to both the theatre play by Roland Schimmelpfennig and the opera by Peter Eötvös. The theatre drama received its first performance at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 2009 and has been one of the most frequently performed German theatre plays during the past few years. In 2010, this play was selected by the critics’ survey in the periodical ‚Theater heute‘ as ‚work of the year‘ and additionally received the Mühlheim Dramatikerpreis [Mühlheim Dramatists’ Prize]. To create the opera, Schimmelpfennig and Eötvös reduced the 45 scenes to 22 without however relinquishing the cinematic style of narration with its fast sequence of cuts and cross-fades. The five singers and 16 musicians required for this opera immediately demonstrates its suitability for transporting to different venues for guest performances; Ensemble Modern embarked on a tour with this opera after its Frankfurt premiere.