Zurich

Choreographer Cathy Marston has a knack for complex female characters. The centerpiece of the three-part ballet evening Countertime at the Zurich Opera House is Marston's emancipatory piece Mrs. Robinson, originally created for San Francisco in 2022 — a ballet that portrays the female protagonist from the film The Graduate not as a clichéd lascivious seductress, but as a vulnerable woman. Marston thus continues her series of interrogations of classical images of women. The ballet essentially follows the film, but develops a new ending: College graduate Benjamin Braddock (Lucas van Rensburg) has no plan but plenty of doubts about the future. In this existential crisis, he slides into an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Yun-Su Park), a married woman from his parents' circle of friends: a scandal ...