Geard Jones - Manon Lescaut (Mainz)

MAINZ - In her longing for a better existence, the attractive Manon Lescaut follows the change in her social situation with absolute will and ambition. She soon realizes that the opportunity she has to love one man and take advantage of another to live a swarming life is by no means crisis-proof. She first sacrifices her love for the student Des Grieux, who is ultimately the only anchor in the abyss of her life, and the rich Geronte also loses interest.

Award-winning concept now on the Mainz stage

The tragic love story of Manon Lescaut is a tale of failure due to the temptations of this world, which sparkle brightly, the failure of an impossible love as well as an inhuman reality.

For the winner of the European Opera Director's Prize 2018, Gerard Jones, who is now staging his award-winning concept for Manon Lescaut at the Mainz State Theater, the opera describes the part of social history that got Harvey Weinstein rolling and led to "#me too". The Abbé Prevost scandal novel has been a subject for numerous directorial genres over the centuries. Gerard Jones stages an opera version that, in its desperate passion, its radicalism, its undisguised realism, goes far beyond the original and opens the view to a world that manages to let men like Donald Trump lead a state. Instead of an idealizing, veiled look at an impossible “Amour fou”, the director wants to concentrate on scenes that bring upset and female impotence against male fantasies. Without describing the happiness of love and without moral condemnation of his ambivalent title character, he will focus on snapshots that particularly come close to the sequence of events with temporal or spatial interruptions to our own present.