Visiting the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau is, I should imagine, on numerous people’s bucket lists. I have wanted to see the production since I first read of the play and the vow that inspired it in my teens. The play has been performed at (usually) ten year intervals since 1634; the performance now habitually falls on years ending in 0, although the 2020 production has been delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three years after I’d booked a trip to see it, I witnessed the play on Thursday 14 July, 2022. The performance takes place in an enormous auditorium seating just short of 5000 people, with the audience covered but the stage open to the sky (with the Alps in the background). The cast, musicians, singers and crew are entirely drawn from the village, and in production years the performances last from May to early October. A good short read about the play is A Pilgrim's Guide to Oberammergau and its Passion Play by Raymond Goodburn (Pilgrim Book Services, 2019) which provides a history of the play and an account of the logistics of the production.
The history of the play is not without its controversies, most specifically the virulent anti-Semitism in the text, which caused a certain audience member named Adolf Hitler to proclaim that the play’s continued production was vital, as it "revealed the muck and mire of Jewry." The same text that Hitler witnessed continued in performance until the first production of the 21st century, in 2000. The play as now performed is mostly by director Christian Stückl, freely adapted from medieval Mystery Play material and subsequent 19th Century revisions by Othmar Weis and J. A. Daisenberger. The Stückl play is a wordy and theologically dense piece which dramatises the Passion story as one of inter-faith conflict, with Jesus the reforming Jew coming into conflict with the ritualistic, empty and hypocritical state of his Jewish religion as propagated by the High Priest Caiaphas and his allies in the Sanhedrin. There are several scenes which almost entirely consist of arguments between the conservative faction, led by Caiaphas, and the supporters of Jesus, led by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. Given that the play is performed in German and without any English surtitles, this is a challenging watch for a non-German speaker (you can follow the text in a printed booklet), but even for those fluent in German, the play offers no concessions to contemporary dramaturgy – it reminds me most strongly of 18th and 19th century writers such as Schiller, Shaw (albeit without the humour), or the Ibsen of Emperor and Galilean. Despite this tendency to verbosity, the play communicates most effectively through visual statements – we see Jesus the servant of his fellows washing their feet, and Caiaphas being borne on a throne by servants. Their contrasting attitudes to leadership and serving their communities is thus simply and eloquently staged.
The director states in the programme that we can no longer rely on audiences to be familiar with the teachings of Jesus (although this presupposes a younger audience than was in evidence at the performance I attended). Despite beginning with the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on a donkey to adoring crowds, much of the first part of the five hour play is taken by Jesus repeating elements of his sermons and disputations from earlier episodes in the gospel (including the prevented stoning of the woman taken in adultery and the Magdalene bathing him with expensive balm). This Jesus is strongly on the side of social justice, pacifism, mutual love and respect. His criticisms of the High Priest and his cronies are based in their failure to help the people or offer good role models. There is some ambiguity in the motivations of Caiaphas and his associates: they claim that they are preventing Jesus from stirring up social unrest and are therefore protecting the people from Roman retaliatory violence (we see Pilate warning them re Jesus), yet they seem personally stung by Jesus critique of them, and therefore his arrest and persecution is an act of spiteful revenge. The portrait of the anti-Jesus majority of the Sanhedrin is carefully handled, to prevent any descent into the kind of medieval caricatures that Durer depicted so viscerally in his Jesus Among the Doctors (1506). Nevertheless, Annas and others are pretty repellent and unforgiving characters. It is clear that Stückl keeps emphasising Jesus and his companion’s Jewishness as a counterbalance; the infamous blood curse – traditionally shouted as the crowd is baying for the release Barabbas and the crucifixion of Christ – is excised, and it’s clear that there is a large Jewish minority in the crowd that believes Jesus to be innocent and wants him freed. Unfortunately, the bad elements outnumber the decent, and who could deny the simple truth of this ever-recurring tendency of the honest to be outnumbered in the popular voice by the barbarous. In the same way, the argument between a formal ritualisation of religion/conviction in the public performance of virtue by a wealthy elite, and the interiorisation of godliness/goodness by those with less power, which manifests in works of empathy and charity, is an eternally reoccurring tendency, occurring today for people of all creeds and nations, those with formal religions or those with ideologies which have replaced religion in the public sphere of our contemporary societies.
If Caiaphas and his crew are dubious in their motivations, the play portrays Judas as much more conflicted. He spends the early part of the play arguing with Jesus about the best way to propagate the message and the efficacy of armed rebellion. His betrayal of Jesus is shown to be based in a naïve belief that if he brings Caiaphas and Jesus together for a chat, Jesus may bring the sceptics in the Sanhedrin around. Of course, he soon discovers that Caiaphas has no interest in listening and is actively plotting Jesus’ death. This sends Judas into a spiral of self-recrimination and despair, disgusted that the Sanhedrin has given him money for his traitorous kiss, and unable to turn back time or persuade the priests to release Jesus. Judas’ realisation of what he has done and his inability to forgive himself for it is dramatized in a sequence of scenes alongside Peter’s three denials. The contrast between Judas committing suicide because he cannot forgive himself and Peter’s accepting that Jesus has forgiven him for his weakness is emphasised in a strong piece of dramatic structuring. Judas and Peter’s betrayals are of a type together, yet one finds forgiveness and the other cannot.
Because Jesus repeats the greatest hits of His ministry in the first part, He has rather more dialogue than He otherwise might in a Passion. There’s also a certain amount of character development – He realises in an early scene that He is going to die in Jerusalem, and confronts the full horror of it in His Gethsemane prayer. In the prayer, He acknowledges that His fate was written before the world began; He is comforted in Gethsemane by the ministrations of an angel (portrayed as a young man without any supernatural attributes). In this way, we feel Jesus’s story as both a very human one – He is assenting to giving up His life – but also the story of a being who is more than human. He clearly asserts to Caiaphas that He is the Messiah, but Nicodemus interprets His supposed blasphemies about being the Son of God by reminding the accusers that all of them refer to God as a father. For me, the story of someone who makes the monumental decision to undergo trial and death, then who finds some solidity within Himself to bear the agony, was the strongest element of the play. I wondered what was going on in His mind as he went through the trials and the Stations of the Cross; as the play offered no interior dialogues for Jesus here, we are left to imagine.
The play’s linear narrative – from the entry into Jerusalem to the discovery of the empty tomb by Mary Magdalene – is punctuated by oratorio-like musical interludes (reminiscent of Bach’s Passions), written in the nineteenth century by Rochus Dedler and revised a number of times since. These are beautiful and powerfully performed by the chorus and soloists; the soprano solo before the Gethsemane scene is particularly exquisite. The hybrid of dramatic play and oratorio is an unusual form, for which I cannot think of any equivalent. The oratorio sections also feature numerous tableaux of Old Testament episodes – the expulsion from Eden, Job mocked, the parting of the red sea, Abraham and Isaac, the raising of the brazen serpent – which speak in relation to the following Passion sequence of scenes. In this way, the play finds a theatrical equivalent to the typographical elements of the Gospels – as if Jesus’s Passion were being underlined as a version of numerous Jewish myths, their ultimate expression in time and space and history. A real, historical man consciously takes upon Himself the mantle of the legend.
The stage is made up of classical columns, emphasising that the life and death of Jesus took place within the setting of classical antiquity, yet also offered a challenge to those who build the columns and pediments, as well as those who collaborate or make deals with the tyrants. It feels significant that the top of the stage was open to the sky – offering a metaphorical escape. We never see the risen Jesus, but the missing roof proposes a possibility.
There’s a lot to consider in the village’s vow to continually perform this man’s trial and death. It is the ultimate example of community theatre – about 2500 of the village’s 5000 inhabitants are involved. The production is an enormous spectacle – the entry into Jerusalem, the driving of the merchants from the temple, the crowd crying for the release of Barabbas, the crucifixion are all immense scenes, stretching across the stage as a living widescreen experience. We chatted to a few of the actors – our waiter in the inn before the play was a performer, and we met Judas, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea and Sanhedrin lawyer Nathaniel as they lounged on the steps outside the theatre at the break. The standard of performance is very high and the concentration is spellbindingly held; the phenomenon gives the lie to the false dichotomy of the amateur and professional. In this way, it is a dramatization of a central tenet of the Gospel – that we all carry a potential within us to present the image of God…
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