'A torrid four-hour affair' ... Hans Otto theatre's Die Satanischen Verse
It has been dubbed one of the "most dangerous theatre premieres of all time" by Germany's press, and the Hans Otto theatre in Potsdam, south-west of Berlin, the "most courageous theatre" in the world for staging it.
In the end, the stage adaptation of one of "the most controversial books" of all time, Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, which led to Iran issuing a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill the writer, was a decidedly torrid four-hour affair.
When I called to book tickets, the woman on the phone said she couldn't decide whether the theatre was "courageous or stupid" to be staging the work. Angry protests by Islamists were foreseen, terror threats were expected and security guards were brought in to patrol the grounds of the riverside theatre.
"As an artist one should show a bit of courage," Uwe Eric Laufenberg, the head of the theatre and director of the play was reported as saying. He pointed out the injustice that far less is known about the contents of the prize-winning novel than about the fatwa, and that formed one of his main motivations for bringing the book to the stage. About a year ago he contacted Rushdie to ask for the rights, and within a day had received a positive response.
Perhaps it was indeed a brave move, but the results unfortunately do little to reflect this boldness. Die Satanischen Verse opens with the shocking scene of a plane being hijacked. Islamists scream their slogans, fumble with their explosives and rip burkas from their bodies before the plane is blown apart.
On board are two film actors, Indian exiles Gibril and Saladin. But rather than die, they continue to exist - Gibril (Robert Gallinowski) as the archangel Gabriel, Saladin (Tobias Rott) as a bare-bottomed Satan - and it is their journeys between the modern and the archaic worlds that form the focus of the play. The action takes place in the metropoles of London and Mumbai (Rushdie's birthplace) as well as the Arabic city of Jahilia, a dream creation in which a new world religion is born.
The acting is wooden and the sound and lighting effects over the top. Nor do the humour and the theatrical potential that Laufenberg said he found in Rushdie's work particularly come to the fore.
One newspaper called it "four hours of naked theatre terror" and a "mix between Bollywood and the Rocky Horror Picture Show", while another aptly summed it up as "a boring sedative".
To give credit where it is due, the play is actually running alongside two others in an ambitious exploration of the theme "metamorphoses". In the German tradition of not doing things by halves, the other offerings are Goethe's Faust and a new work by the German playwright Katharina Schlender, Der Zufriedene (The Contented One), about a man who tries to come to terms with his long-term unemployed status.
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