satyagraha at eno
April 4, 2007
To the Coliseum last night for the dress rehearsal of ENO’s new production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, about the young Ghandi’s formulation of non-violent protest in South Africa.
ENO were canny in appointing Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, the duo behind the hit Shockheaded Peter, to produce and design the show, which looks fantastic. A corrugated-iron backdrop is animated by beautifully projected text, and there is the expected array of fantastical puppetry and imaginatively low-fi stage effects. Musically things were in good shape under Johannes Debus; there were a few ragged moments in the chorus, but I’m sure they’ll be sharpened up for opening night.
In short, I really wanted to like it. I have friends who are so enthralled by Glass that it makes me wonder what I’m missing. They will love this show. But there is something about the ponderous portentousness of Glass’s music that I can’t get past, even when conceptually I can see what it’s all about. The opera deals in ritual and poetry, not narrative, so it is appropriate that the music offers static tableaux rather than the traditional teleology. Past, present and future coexist, so what’s the hurry? I just can’t experience Glass’s music as anything other than banal and inexpressive, repeatedly pushing the same harmonic-melodic buttons .
The staging offers wierd and wonderful visions to complement the music – most strikingly a crowd of gigantic leering puppets emerging from behind cut-out city buildings, and the sudden appearance of a triumvirate of Hindu gods as the apotheosis of act II. However, the third act is terribly thin musically and visually – there is a rather pointless reprisal of the sellotape tricks of Sticky, and the Martin Luther King/civil rights riots stuff doesn’t work at all. Our culture is saturated with these images, often appropriated to serve other ends, and this looks like another snatch-and-grab job to lend gravitas to a stage entertainment.
But last time I went to ENO I said that Gadaffi: The Opera wasn’t all bad, so what do I know?
Incidentally, this may be the first production by ENO not to be sung in English (it’s in Sanskrit) – does anyone know otherwise?
April 8, 2007 at 12:27 pm
1. Akhnaten (in 1985) in ancient Egyptian
2. Oedipus Rex (originally in 1960 but often revived. A second production was presented during(the 1990/91 season) always in Latin
3. Orfeo Sadler’s Wells’ first production of Monterverdi’s Orfeo, which was revived after the company’s move to the Coliseum, was always played in the original Italian. A second production in 1981 was translated into English.
May 9, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I stand corrected! Thanks.