Don’t be put off by the fact that the libretto of this stunning production is in Sanskrit. Philip Glass’s spine-tingling 1980 opera, loosely following the life of Gandhi, is mesmerising both aurally and visually in this revived co-production with New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Forget about a linear narrative (there isn’t one) and just give yourself up to the sheer meditative pleasure of the haunting repetitions and the imaginative staging.
Under the inventive direction of Improbable theatre company’s Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch, everything moves at a slow, hypnotic pace, perfectly attuned to Glass’s minimalist music and in keeping with Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent protest.
Intermittently, English surtitles (the text is culled from the Bhagavad-Gita) are projected onto the simple curved corrugated set, before fading gently away. A battle is waged between giant warriors which seem to appear from nowhere, constructed of papier-mâché and everyday objects. Parallel streams of sticky tape are somehow fashioned into an outsize creature by a performer suspended overhead. Gandhi himself metamorphoses from a lawyer in a suit to the more familiar robed figure over the course of the three acts which visit, in turn, spiritual guardians (Tolstoy, the Indian poet Tagore and Martin Luther King) whom Glass links to the Satyagraha principles he embraced.
The disciplined chorus and Elena Xanthoudakis’s intense Miss Schlesen impress, but Alan Oke (returning to the central role he played when the production premiered here three years ago) is, once again, unforgettable – a dignified presence with a pure, powerful voice which soars with an ethereal beauty of total conviction.
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