State Opera of South Australia: Philip Glass Trilogy

State Opera of South Australia: Philip Glass Trilogy –
Her Majesty’s Theatre. 19, 21, & 23  August -

The State Opera of South Australia has a proud history of making large-scale work, having produced the first all-Australian production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 2004, and co-produced Jake Heggie’s magnificent Moby Dick in 2011. The trilogy of Philip Glass ‘portrait operas’—Akhnaten, Satyagraha and Einstein on the Beach—is another such epic undertaking, with the three works totaling nine hours and twenty minutes performance time, shown in three weekly cycles during the month of August. The State Opera has previously mounted small-scale versions of these works, but this new production is a much bigger project, involving the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, the Adelaide Art Orchestra, the State Opera soloists and chorus, Leigh Warren Dancers, and student dancers from the Adelaide College of the Arts. The same creative team is behind the trilogy as the previous productions, with Leigh Warren directing and choreographing, Tim Sexton conducting and directing the chorus, Mary Moore designing sets and costumes, and Geoff Cobham designing the lighting.

Not only is the production a world first—the operas have never been shown as a trilogy before—but in the hands of Warren, they become as much dance as opera. Warren’s masterstroke is to overlay an almost continuous stream of contemporary dance onto the music, with superb results, especially in the first two operas. These are not narrative operas in any sense, but rather impressionistic, being made up of vignettes or key scenes that seek to illuminate aspects of each subject, with the libretto drawn from disparate cultural texts in a range of languages. Each opera uses the historical person of its title as a vehicle to explore big ideas; thus in Glass’s schema Akhnaten represents religion, Einstein science and Gandhi, the subject of Satyagraha, politics.

Akhnaten concerns the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhnaten (husband of Nefertiti and father of Tutankhamun), who, by installing Aten the sun god at the centre of Egyptian religious life, is credited by some scholars as being the founder of monotheism. Warren has reframed Akhnaten, played by sweet-voiced counter-tenor Tobias Cole, and Nefertiti, played by mezzo-soprano Cherie Boogaart, as contemporary power couple, and in various scenes we see the funeral of Akhnaten’s father, his coronation and wedding to Nefertiti, his founding of a new city, and finally his fall and subsequent erasure from the historical record. The text is sung in a mixture of Egyptian, English, Hebrew and other ancient languages—translations are provided in the program— backed by the full symphony orchestra. From the first scene to the last the six androgynous, black-clad dancers (Lonii Garnons-Williams, Rachel Jenson, Jenni Large, Glen McCurley, Aidan Munn and Nicholas Tredrea) are central to the action. Initially reminiscent of Egyptian tomb paintings, combining frontal and profile views in stiff, formal movements, their movements gradually become more fluid and expressive. Although the stage occasionally feels a little cluttered, when dancers, soloists and opera chorus are on together, overall the effect is powerful.

From a dance perspective, Einstein on the Beach is the most engrossing of the trilogy: musically and in a narrative sense, it is the most abstract and hence benefits greatly from the addition of dance. Warren has assembled a fabulous cast of dancers, including many alumni of his company: some, such as Deon Hastie, have come out of retirement, some, such as Gala Moody, have returned from overseas, to take part. Because this opera is sung entirely by the chorus, lined up on a staircase to the rear of the stage, with music supplied by a band set upstage, most of the space is available for dance, and Warren makes full use of it. With twelve superb dancers to play with (Michael Carter, Lonii Garnon-Williams, Lisa Griffiths, Mitchell Harvey, Deon Hastie, Kynan Hughes, Rebecca Jones, Jenni Large, Glen McCurley, Gala Moody, Nicholas Tredrea and Paul Walker), plus a chorus of terrific singers not afraid to strut their stuff, Warren’s inventiveness does not flag for the full four hours running time. There is a glorious section in which both dancers and chorus make the motions of a Newton’s cradle, another extended section in which the dancers find infinite ways to dance on, under, over and around some park benches, a long sequence en pointe for Rebecca Jones, and many more combinations of text and movement too numerous to mention.

The text itself is largely nonsensical, consisting of the recitation of numerical sequences, plus oddball stories with seemingly nothing to do with Einstein or science, but there are poignant moments, none more so than the ending, which has a male chorus member, Norbert Hohl, recounting a story about two lovers on a park bench whilst Lisa Giffiths, who is utterly wonderful throughout, dances a slow solo. There is, it seems to say, no equation for love. Watching such a lengthy opera could have been something of a marathon, but instead the experience of seeing this production of Einstein is joyous and exhilarating and uplifting.

Satyagraha is both shorter and more sombre in tone, presenting vignettes from the life of Mahatma Gandhi and his leadership of the struggle for Indian independence. This is a more traditional opera with something more akin to a narrative, and the lead is sung beautifully by tenor Adam Goodburn. The staging is once more exemplary: Mary Moore’s set consists of a staircase the width of the stage, leading up to an archway to the sky, and there are some wonderful theatrical effects, such as newspaper pages dropping onto the audience from above and the enclosing of the cast in bars that descend from the flies to symbolize a prison. Dance plays a lesser role, the body-suited dancers from the Adelaide College of the Arts acquitting themselves well but appearing in only a few scenes, the most memorable of which is the ending, when they are arrayed below Gandhi on the staircase, gradually assuming the lotus pose to his long exquisitely sung concluding solo.

In sum, this is a monumental achievement for State Opera SA, and for Warren in particular; it would be perfect as a festival piece and deserves all the accolades it has been given. Surely, surely, it will, it must, be shown again.

- Maggie Tonkin