Ruhrtriennale 2025 Opens:

HE DID IT HIS WAY… AGAIN!

Ivo van Hove opens the Ruhrtriennale 2025 with the non-production I Did It My Way
What went so thoroughly wrong? wonders the reviewer, looking back on the evening.

by Klaus Dilger

Last year, “Oscar-nominee” Sandra Hüller went in search of absolute beauty (I Want Absolute Beauty), attempting to shape a music theatre piece from a string of 26 PJ Harvey songs. She was supported by eight dancers from Ballet National de Marseille (La Horde) and a guest appearance by Isabelle Huppert.

This year, for the opening of the Ruhrtriennale, Lars Eidinger teams up with two dancers from Faso Danse Théâtre (Belgium) and singer-songwriter Larissa Sirah Herden for her first theatre production. Together they set 29 songs by Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone in search of music theatre — and of an answer to the question of what unites and divides these songs and the people they address in an “America” built of the façades of the American Dream and the abysses behind them.

That might have been exciting. Especially in light of the alarming political developments under Donald Trump, which concern us all.

For I DID IT MY WAY, Ivo van Hove commissioned his long-time set and lighting designer (and husband) Jan Versweyveld to erect the façade of a bland, white-painted, two-storey small-town house inside the Jahrhunderthalle. Hidden on its roof (barely visible to the audience) sits the big band, steering the musical arrangements from above with sensitivity and skill.

Six small windows face front. On the left, a covered entrance; to the right, a narrow glass door (leading to a backyard?). An oversized streetlamp, a few puddles (Watertown?), and a whole lot of nothing — a void the performers would have had to fill with songs and action.

Only when the blinds of the house’s windows close electrically does the façade (and the production) come alive. At those moments, it mutates into a projection screen for images and history, and the piece into a silent movie with songs. (More on this later.)

The inspiration for van Hove’s “new vision of music theatre” came, as the programme booklet tells us, from Sinatra’s concept album Watertown.

This fictional small-town narrative tells of a man whose wife one morning, without warning or explanation, leaves him and their two sons with a simple “Goodbye.”

From then on he tries, in this supposedly idyllic yet stagnant place, to comprehend and overcome the sudden separation. Since Sinatra’s Watertown songs lack a female perspective — no reasons, no explanations — van Hove and dramaturg Koen Tachelet chose to add Nina Simone’s songs to fill that gap, as we learn from a Ruhrtriennale podcast introducing the work.

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But it is not Frank Sinatra. Instead, it is an unnamed white man (Lars Eidinger), with two unnamed white children — shadows, doubles? (dancers Marco Labellarte and Samuel Planas) — who is left behind, not by Nina Simone but by an unnamed Black woman (Larissa Sirah Herden), together with her sisters, shadows, doubles? (dancers Ida Faho and Sylvie Sanou). And yet, aside from the 29 songs of these two musical icons, van Hove gives them no further text — apart from the two words “see you” — with which to explore these landscapes of the soul and topographies of feeling. Landscapes that might have been discovered had the direction shown any real determination.

Whether as a fictional, unequal couple — Sinatra and Simone — or simply as nameless figures, it matters little, for the songs, whose lyrics are projected beneath the roofline, scarcely and only artificially enter into dialogue with each other. That helps neither audience nor performers.

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What life, what fate, what being was meant to emerge here?

“…a relationship is described here, of being together yet divided by a fundamental estrangement, of not recognising one another. Our Western world and its narrative are dominated by whiteness and masculinity. Here the Black woman is given space to express herself, to perceive and to make herself perceived. It is about emancipation, and it stands against discrimination and the oppression of women and people of colour. Allegorically, the couple moves apart in order to move closer, to reflect, to recognise. The man circles around himself and mourns abandonment, while the woman fights for equality and social justice.”
So says Lars Eidinger in the programme booklet.

But on stage this happens, at best, as a mere illustration to Nina Simone’s songs — though Larissa Sirah Herden interprets them with an outstanding and powerful voice. Most compellingly in Strange Fruit, paired with the aforementioned “silent-movie cinema,” when the projection zooms out infinitely slowly from a photo of white onlookers witnessing the lynching of two Black men.

Here Nina Simone becomes the civil-rights activist; her song cuts deep, and Larissa — the nameless Black woman — becomes Nina Simone through her voice.

But where does Frank Sinatra become the nameless white man, and where does Lars Eidinger become Frank Sinatra?

That Lars Eidinger can sing is beyond question — but he is no singer, and certainly no Sinatra. He is intelligent enough to know it. But then: whom, or what, was he supposed to embody here?

Eidinger is a gifted mover, yet choreographer Serge Aimé Coulibaly finds no language of movement with which to develop further dimensions for the performers — no architecture or depth for a piece crying out for both. Nor does Jan Versweyveld as lighting designer: his light changes create no dimensions, only “variation.” For a fleeting moment the opposite is true, when one of the dancers moves with her own shadow across the bourgeois façade… but only for seconds.

Where was the directing hand? Where was Ivo van Hove, in his opening production of 2025 at one of the most heavily subsidised arts festivals in the world — a production whose best moments were silent film with songs?

What went so wrong? wonders the reviewer, looking back on an evening the audience will most likely have already forgotten… again and again.

A pity, too, for Lars Eidinger, who could have given — and been — so much more. He, above all, but also the others — from whom we have seen far better — cannot possibly be satisfied with this. And yet:

Standing ovations.
Because who wants to admit that the €99 for the best seat could have been better spent?