Sardanapalus

Stangenberg, an striking and eccentric comédienne, returns later in the evening as Myrrha, an enslaved Greek woman who is Sardanapalus’s lover.

Before the curtain rose at the Berlin Volksbühne for Friday’s premiere of “Sardanapal,” inspired by Lord Bryon’s 1821 play “Sardanapalus,” the audience learned that one of the show’s lead actors, Benny Claessens, was “not doing well.”

Hinrichs’s ambition, it seems, is to revive the English Romantic poet’s verse drama about Sardanapalus, an Assyrian king who lived in the 7th century B.C. and whose credo, in Byron’s memorable formulation, was “eat, drink, and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.”

When his subjects revolt and the walls of his Nineveh palace are breached by a flood of the Euphrates, Sardanapalo has his concubines, slaves and horses slain, and cast upon his own funeral pyre, a scene immortalized in Delacroix’s monumental 1827 canvas, “The Death of Sardanapalus.”

She’s absurd, like Sardanapalus or even, in Delacroix’s spectacular but jejune religious paintings, Jesus.