The naked (and the wrinkled) truth about Verdi's masked ball

Thirty-five naked and cash-strapped pensioners in Mickey Mouse masks will do their best to shock opera-goers in the east German city of Erfurt tonight when a re-interpretation of Verdi's A Masked Ball holds its premiere.

The work is being staged by the Austrian director Johann Kresnik, 68, a Marxist, who is famous throughout the German-speaking world for his provocative, anti-capitalist productions and his penchant for lavish displays of naked flesh.

His reworking of Verdi's 1859 opera promises to be no exception. Its setting is Ground Zero, the post- 9/11 ruin of New York's World Trade Centre, and the protagonists include not only nude pensioners, but lots of naked young women and a woman in a red swimsuit sporting a Hitler moustache.

The naked male and female pensioners, the oldest being 69, will have their bodies coated with grey paint and will wear their masks throughout the show. In other scenes, actors will appear on stage draped in the Stars and Stripes and burning Uncle Sam hats.

Kresnik admitted yesterday that his interpretation had little to do with Verdi's original work about the assassination of the Swedish King Gustavus II in 1792. The monarch was shot at a masked ball and at the time censors insisted Verdi reset the opera in the US so as not to depict the murder of a European king.

Kresnik's production is still set in the US but attacks today's American values. "It will be a different, provocative masked ball on the ruins of the World Trade Centre," he said.

"The naked stand for people without means, the victims of capitalism, the underclass, who don't have anything any more."

His decision to stage the show in unemployment-racked eastern Germany, a region still renowned for nude bathing, ensured there was no difficulty in finding a naked cast for the production. Erfurt's theatre advertised for older extras to appear without clothes in the performance and received more than 60 replies from hard-up pensioners eager to get their clothes off.

One extra who survived on the limited budget of a state pension said he would use the cash to buy himself a television set. Another said she wanted to buy her grandchild a birthday present.

Kresnik said: "If I put naked people on stage, I am not doing it because I want to provoke per se. I am doing it for a reason: many of these people can identify with the social situation they are depicting on stage."

Kresnik earned his reputation as an enfant terrible of German language theatre with a string of provocative productions involving exposed flesh.

Four years ago, he ridiculed the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl by depicting him on stage in his underpants. In a production in Bremen called The Ten Commandments, he had eight elderly women sitting naked at sewing machines in the city's cathedral, making German flags.

Guy Montavon, the manager of Erfurt Theatre, said he met Kresnik in 1985. "His work is very exciting and thought-provoking," he said, "His production of A Masked Ball is a critique of America and underlines the decadent traits in society of today."

One politician, from Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling conservative Christian Democrats, called the opera a scandal and called for a boycott.

Mr Montavon said tonight's premiere and four subsequent performances were already sold out.