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Descent into darkness … The Exterminating Angel at the Salzburg festival last year.
Descent into darkness … Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel at the Salzburg festival last year. Photograph: Monika Rittershaus
Descent into darkness … Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel at the Salzburg festival last year. Photograph: Monika Rittershaus

How Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel became opera’s most surreal soiree

This article is more than 6 years old

More than 50 years on, Thomas’s Adès’s latest opera is a chilling response to the classic film about a dinner party from which the guests have no escape

In Woody Allen’s 2011 comedy Midnight in Paris, an American screenwriter named Gil is magically transported back to the 1920s, where he meets the glittering artistic figures resident in Paris at the time. Among them is the Spanish director Luis Buñuel. Gil decides to pitch him an idea for a film that Buñuel would not get round to making for decades. It’s about a group of socialites who attend a dinner, then find themselves mysteriously unable to leave. Buñuel frowns. “But I don’t get it. Why don’t they just walk out of the room?”

It’s the best joke in Allen’s movie: a tribute to a surrealist classic so radically perplexing that even its own creator can’t fathom it. As testimony to the enduring strangeness of Buñuel’s 1962 film The Exterminating Angel, this claustrophobic horror story has now been turned into an opera by British composer Thomas Adès; premiered to acclaim in Salzburg last year, it arrives at London’s Royal Opera House later this month.

Buñuel’s film has sometimes been compared to Lord of the Flies: it’s about a group of people who, cut off from the social rules that sustain them, find their very selves caving in as they revert to a kind of barbarism. Adès has commented, “It’s about the end of the world. It’s a catastrophe.” Indeed, the sight of these elegant patricians hacking away at walls in search of water, or roasting captive sheep using a smashed cello for firewood, feels very close to JG Ballard’s apocalyptic scenarios of social collapse.

The Exterminating Angel may not be as widely acclaimed as it once was – and neither, perhaps, is Buñuel himself. His once fashionable late work – the French films of the 60s and 70s, including Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – now look, for all their provocations, a little stiff and academic. But the great films of his Mexican period, The Exterminating Angel included, remain very much alive, dramatically and visually. And his pioneering surrealist films, in collaboration with Salvador Dalí – Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or – still crackle with subversive energy, surviving the museification that history has imposed on them.

Chamber drama par excellence … Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962). Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.com

Exiled from Franco’s Spain, Buñuel spent several years in the US, then broke a 14-year absence from directing after moving to Mexico in 1946. Many of his Mexican films are pot-boiling melodramas, but some are masterpieces – notably Los Olvidados, a harshly realist drama about street children, and Simon of the Desert, a brief, delirious portrait of one of the canon’s weirder saints. Then there was Viridiana, made with a Mexican producer and star but shot in Spain, and promptly banned there: a scabrously incisive drama about a young nun (played by Silvia Pinal) whose life is changed when she falls into the clutches of a perverse uncle.

As for The Exterminating Angel, it prefigures Buñuel’s late critiques of bourgeois morality, but with striking visual style and dramatic rigour. It’s a chamber drama par excellence, about characters who can’t leave the chamber. It’s also a desert island story: Buñuel’s script was originally called Los Náufragos de la Calle Providencia (The Castaways of Providence Street, that being an actual Mexico City address), until he decided to borrow a title from playwright José Bergamín (“If I saw The Exterminating Angel on a marquee,” he told Bergamín, “I’d go in and see it on the spot”). Bergamín told Buñuel that the title was in any case in the public domain, as it already existed in the Bible.

The film begins eerily, with only touches of overt surrealism. A dinner party is in preparation at a grand mansion, but the staff are hurriedly deserting, to the annoyance of hostess Lucia, who has prepared a surprise for her guests: there are sheep and a bear on the premises. The guests arrive directly from a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and perplexingly they arrive twice (an apparent continuity flaw that in fact was deliberately shot and included twice by Buñuel, although it is unfortunately erased in some available versions of the film). Gossip, bitchy badinage and innuendo fill the evening, and there is superstition in the air: two men exchange secret masonic signs, a woman’s handbag turns out to contain chicken’s feet for cabbalistic purposes.

The Exterminating Angel at the Salzburg festival last year. Photograph: Monika Rittershaus

As the soiree winds down, host Edmundo casually comments that the revellers might like to stay the night – which they do without ceremony, camping out on floors and sofas. The next morning, however, they’re still there: the guests and butler Julio (Claudio Brook) find themselves unable to cross the threshold of the salon. Not that they don’t try to understand why. “We will only overcome our plight by cold analysis,” they say, but that approach doesn’t work for them, any more than it has for critics over six decades of debate.

The film’s brilliance lies partly in the sustained concentration with which Buñuel pursues a simple premise – one less akin to early surrealism than to the 50s-60s theatre of the absurd, for example to Eugène Ionesco’s plays in which, in the most matter-of-fact way, people turn into rhinoceroses or are crowded out of their flats by ever-growing corpses. Another of the film’s glories is the grimly atmospheric photography by the great Mexican cameraman Gabriel Figueroa, with its encroaching chiaroscuro and precise compositions. And the film is distinguished by an extraordinary ensemble cast, with every character given equal weight: it was, commented Pinal, who plays opera singer Leticia, “like two lead roles divided between 22 characters”.

Gossip, bitchy badinage and innuendo in The Exterminating Angel. Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.com

The Exterminating Angel has attracted varying interpretations, high-flown and mundane, Freudian and political. The late critic Roger Ebert said, “Obviously, the dinner guests represent the ruling class in Franco’s Spain”, although one can’t see that there’s much “obviously” about it: still, it’s significant that this is a film about domestic entrapment made by a man exiled from his own home.

It’s also notable that some of the film’s most outlandish elements have their origins in reality. Buñuel claimed to have encountered sheep and a bear at an actual dinner in New York. At one point, women emerge from a cupboard they have been using as a toilet: one remarks that she has just seen an eagle flying beneath her. Delirious poetry indeed – but according to Pinal, Buñuel explained that near his home town of Calanda in northern Spain, he was once peeing on a high promontory and saw an eagle fly by. These cupboards, enclosures within an enclosure, are a key to the film: they are where the characters retreat to defecate, make love and die, and on the door of one, an angel is painted. What is the exterminating angel if not human physicality itself – everything that makes us alive, and mortal?

In the Royal Opera House rehearsal room on Hildegard Bechtler’s set, a vast wooden arch stands over reproduction Brâncuși sculptures, marking the boundary of the characters’ prison. The opera’s director and librettist, Tom Cairns, tells me that The Exterminating Angel presents its audience with a sobering mirror. “Opera isn’t so much like this any more, but it has a reputation for being a glittering elitist activity. [Buñuel’s characters] have just all been to the opera, so there are all sorts of connections with the opera house. The main thrust of what we want to do is to let people see that it could be them.” That idea was borne out by comments Cairns heard following the Salzburg premiere: “Many people that night said it’s about now, and they found it frightening – what people became, how they ended up with nothing when they’d had everything.”

The Exterminating Angel is a nightmare whose time seems to have come again. In a time of political uncertainty unparalleled in recent memory, our shared sense of “what next?” panic and inertia finds its echo in these people who can barely rouse themselves to leave a room, or take any decisive action beyond attempting to survive. In a remarkable instance of synchronicity, Stephen Sondheim has recently been workshopping his own work in progress, a show to be entitled Buñuel and based on both The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – a peripatetic farce in which a group of friends tantalisingly fail even to have dinner in the first place. The two composers have, it seems, discussed their respective projects, with Sondheim commenting that the comparison should make for “an enlightening and provocative study”. It certainly should, and both productions will be essential viewing – but audiences should probably hold off on ordering their taxis until they’ve managed to leave the theatre.

The Exterminating Angel opens at the Royal Opera House, London WC2E, on 24 April. roh.org.uk.

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