Iphigenia, who has just turned twenty-one, wants to be a star pianist. She doesn’t do it below. But hey: In the family it is certified that she not only looks attractive but also highly talented. The mother Klytemnestra is of course an exaggerated star actress who has learned to put her suffering into roles: After all, everything is material and therefore reusable. The father Agamemnon, a star scientist, wears black and is otherwise agile. Ethics and morals are his business. He has just published his latest work, a MeToo book and an introspection of perpetrators and victims – on both sides the crime goes hand in hand with a loss of meaning, according to his thesis, which he backs up with all sorts of Bible knowledge and Kierkegaard. This is guaranteed to be a bestseller, the family believes, were it not for the abuse of their own daughter Iphigenia. She wants to make it public now of all times that Uncle Menelaus abused her for years. Agamemnon’s ethics career would be done and his book with it. Of course, he had unconsciously wanted to get his own family drama off his chest.
What sounds like a screenplay from the series “Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten” is in fact the key that is supposed to open up access to the Iphigenia material of this last play at the Salzburg Festival: that here the moral theorist Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia for his own career as once his in the myth of the Troy warriors. In the case of Euripides, the father did this as reparation because he had angered the goddess Artemis – who, as is well known, was to be followed by all sorts of sacrifices, while Iphigenia was saved by Artemis at the last second and ordained island priestess. Agamemnon’s conflict-averse revenant on the Hallein stage (Sebastian Zimmler) has no revenge campaign in mind, the self-optimizer is only concerned with his own circulation.
