There’s this thing that happens when you strip away everything you think you know about a piece of art, when you stop genuflecting at the altar of tradition and just look at what’s actually there, raw and pulsing and strange. Robert Wilson gets this. He gets that Shakespeare’s sonnets were never meant to be polite museum pieces, carefully preserved behind glass for tourists to photograph and forget.
Walking into the Berliner Ensemble for this 2009 production feels like stumbling into someone else’s opium dream, except the smoke is made of light and the hallucinations have been choreographed with surgical precision. Wilson doesn’t direct so much as he architects, building spaces where time moves like honey, where a single gesture can stretch across what feels like geological epochs. 25 sonnets, winnowed down from the 154 by Jutta Ferbers with the kind of brutal editorial instinct that separates wheat from chaff, stripped of pretense, freed from the prison of their own reputation.
And then there’s Rufus Wainwright’s score: this mongrel thing that shouldn’t work, this collision of medieval German Minnesang and cabaret and pop that sounds like what you’d hear if you could crawl inside the skull of someone caught between centuries, between identities, between the person they’re supposed to be and the one they actually are. It’s romantic when it needs to be, sure, but there’s something rotting underneath, something disturbing and feral that reminds you these poems were never just pretty words about pretty feelings.
These sonnets are queer. Not in the sanitized, historicized, we can explain this away sense, but genuinely, thrillingly fluid in their desires. Male, female, the boundaries dissolve. The Fair Youth, the Dark Lady: Wilson doesn’t apologize for any of it, doesn’t soft-pedal the subversive gender play that’s been sitting there in plain sight for four hundred years while scholars coughed politely and changed the subject.
The Berliner Ensemble actors move through this landscape like figures in a Renaissance painting that’s been dipped in formaldehyde: the boy, the fool, Cupid rendered as something both ancient and utterly contemporary, Elizabeth I herself, Shakespeare watching his own words performed back to him. Every gesture is sculpted, every beam of light a character in its own right. Wilson treats theater like installation art, like performance can be both discipline and fever.
What emerges isn’t nostalgia, isn’t dusty reverence for Shakespeare. It’s recognition that these poems, written by a man in a world we’ll never fully access, still speak directly to the confusion and hunger of wanting what you want, being who you are, in a world that demands explanations you don’t owe anyone. Suspended in time, yeah. But alive. Dangerously, uncomfortably alive.