Oberammergau, Germany - Jesus was called aside the other day and told how to ride his donkey into Jerusalem.
“You’ve got to put a bit more ‘Yes we can!’ into it,” the director Christian Stueckl told the star of this year’s Oberammergau passion play.
To thank God for sparing them from the worst of the Black Death in the 17th century, the residents of Oberammergau, a village high in the Bavarian Alps, stage a re-enactment of the Crucifixion every ten years.
This is the first time, however, that Barack Obama has been held up as a model of how to play Christ.
“This time round the Jesus role is bigger, and he will have to convey joy, suffering and anger,” Jesus told The Times, “but he will also be more political, a political preacher calling for change.” Jesus is being played by 29-year-old Frederik Mayet, a press spokesman at a Munich theatre, and by Andreas Richter, 32, a child psychologist.
The lead roles are doubled up because it is impossible to hold down a full-time job and be on stage for nine hours, five times a week for months on end. More than 2,000 ordinary people are involved — half the village — and about 5,000 people a night will come for 100 nights to watch the play and listen to its music.
But the Oberammergau spectacle has always been political. It is the biggest, oldest and most controversial performance of its kind.
Above all, the Jewish community carefully monitors the texts, costumes and stage direction because for four centuries the play has, often with astonishing bluntness, made the case that the Jews killed Christ. Hitler came in 1930 and loved it; the play then seemed to gush with the very heartblood of popular anti-Semitism.
Now, with the 2010 performances looming, the organisers have been holding talks with Jewish representatives to defuse any potential row. On one side of the table sits the play’s in-house theologian, Professor Ludwig Moedl, and on the other rabbis James Rudin, Noam Marans and Eric Greenberg of the American Jewish Committee and of the Anti-Defamation League.
It seems that the only controversy in this year’s play may be whether Jesus should be crucified at night. Until now, performances began in the morning, broke for a three-hour lunch break and ended in early evening. The village traders prefer it that way, since it gives the pilgrims time to shop.
But Mr Stueckl insisted that darkness was more appropriate to the moment of crucifixion, even if that meant issuing spectators with blankets against the Alpine cold that can bite even during the summer.
Mr Stueckl, a woodcarver by training, also directed the 1990 and 2000 versions of the passion play. He ranks as a reformer — someone who is willing to modernise the performance (Muslim residents of the village were allowed to take part for the first time in 2000, as Roman guards) and address in detail Jewish complaints.
The upshot could be uncomfortable for Christian spectators.
“We have to present the historical Jesus, even if we know only a few things for sure about him,” says Mr Stueckl. “As a Jew, who can only be understood with reference to his Jewish faith.”
“That’s how we want to do it this year — to depict Jesus who fights with unbelievable determination to stay true to his God, who is also the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac — in other words, the God of the Jews.” Pontius Pilate will be shown not as a good or even rational man, apparently unwilling to put Christ to death and leaving it up to the crowd to decide, but as a tyrannical governor who had already put thousands to death.
“I’m not interested in whitewashing Pontius Pilate, and I don’t want to make the crucifixion look as bloody as possible; I don’t even want to claim a Christian monopoly on Jesus,” says Mr Stueckl.
Nonetheless, Mr Mayet’s changing room is the only one to have a sink in the corner, as he will need it to wash off the theatrical gore every night.
He has been trying out the cross for size. “I think it is going to be physically very demanding,” he says, “under my loincloth I will have a climber’s belt that straps me to the cross. Underneath the feet there are small platforms to take some of the pressure away. But the cross leans forward, which is a very unpleasant feeling — you get an idea of what a terrible way it is to die. I was the Apostle John in 2000 and was hoping for Judas or Simon Peter this time round. When I was offered Jesus I was completely flabbergasted,” says Mr Mayet, “It is what everyone wants to do from his childhood.
“Since I became Jesus, children have been staring at me in the street— I have become a figure of respect for the villagers.”