Top director and visual artist Robert Wilson is received with great pleasure as a guest in Het Muziektheater. After producing a wonderful atmosphere in Het Muziektheater with The Black Rider, POEtry, I la Galigo and Butterfly, he now returns with his latest production, The Tempation of Saint Anthony. This is a musical-theatrical work about fantasies, sins and temptation, and Wilson worked on the production together with Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the popular and swinging Afro-American group ‘Sweet Honey in the Rock’. In a philosophical spectacle Wilson and Reagon illustrate the conflict between body and spirit and good and bad, hoping to find solutions for the divided world in which we live.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony is based on the novel of the same name written by the French writer Gustave Flaubert in 1874. Saint Anthony is a hermit who lives in the 3rd century and inhabits a world shaped by religious and political conflict. He finds himself plagued by questions, and in his search for answers he puts himself to the test by subjecting himself to a number of temptations. A fabulous banquet makes him greedy, and a vision of the attractive Queen of Sheeba subjects the philosophical Saint Anthony to fierce feelings of lust and desire. Having undergone a further series of attractive, and therefore difficult to resist, temptations, he ultimately develops a new vision of reality.