Satyagraha - Press Reviews

Philip Glass must be a very happy man. After 27 years of musical and dramatic inertia, his opera Satyagraha finally assumes the ascendancy on an English stage. It's as improbable an outcome as the name of the theatre company that has made it possible: Improbable. But this collaboration between its founders - the director and designer team of Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch - and English National Opera must be deemed an extraordinary success. It finds theatre in the most inherently untheatrical of scores, puts flesh on its minimalist frame, and, most importantly, almost avoids the obvious pitfall of subjugating the piece to the staging (and thus becoming merely another of Glass's intrusive film scores). In some ways, and certainly to Western ears, Philip Glass might seem to provide the perfect musical counterpart to the story of Mahatma Gandhi's long and humbling pilgrimage to reconcile the spiritual and the political and bring about change through non-violent means. The eternal arpeggios, the unvarnished unisons, the absence of harmonic complication in Glass's music - these simple devices set their own agenda for change; they suggest their own passive resistance. But passive is the operative word. Glass is; Gandhi wasn't. And so Glass simply contents himself with the creation of trance-inducing musical mantras to mirror Gandhi's contemplative nature. The spectre of RSI - Repetitive Strain Injury - hovers over the hapless string players of the ENO orchestra, whose bowing arm stamina (under the direction of Johannes Debus) is a source of wonder throughout the long evening. It begins with just one voice - the true and purposeful tenor of Alan Oke in the title role. He is alone in the half-light of an empty stage. He is in Western dress, a student of law in South Africa. Gradually we are aware of a corrugated cyclorama - the building material of the townships. Shadowy figures encircle him. His journey begins. The book from which he draws daily sustenance is the source of the opera's Sanskrit text: the Bhagavada Gita ("Song of the Lord"), the basis of Gandhi's philosophic meditations. A succession of quotations or even single words appear across the cyclorama or on newspapers held aloft by groups of westerners who read only what they are required to read. Director and designer McDermott and Crouch make much use of newspapers as a political metaphor - the freedom of information used as a channel for propaganda. Gandhi is attacked by missiles fashioned from newspaper. At one point he physically immerses himself in reams of it, crumpled and falling like a waterfall, as if indulging in an act of purification. The visual ingenuity of McDermott and Crouch's staging is a constant source of intrigue and illumination. Extraordinary puppets materialise and transform before our eyes: a holy cow becomes a fearsome warrior, countless yards of plastic tape (the "red tape" of politics, if you like) are somehow manipulated into a hovering angel. You don't always quite believe your eyes as actors on stilts or actors seeming to hover in space work their magic. When Gandhi returns home to India he is dwarfed by the might of the British establishment represented by grotesque cartoon-like puppets. They, too, have emerged from the pages of a newspaper. But the images that will linger longest in the mind are the simplest and sparest - like the vision of a weary Gandhi moving to stand beneath the podium where Martin Luther King is delivering his "I have a dream" speech. Frankly, it's all more than Glass's opera earns or deserves. Even in this context, his musical meanderings sound like the endless recycling of notation in search of inspiration. The ENO chorus, the whole ensemble, perform miracles of concentration with his onomatopoeic loops. But on more than a few occasions I was tempted to add my own philosophic epigram: the wise man seeks release from the musical torpor of Philip Glass. Improbably, Improbable provide it.

As so often in recent years, a lot of the drama at English National Opera has been happening offstage. In early March a warning of possible redundancies led to reports that a strike was in the offing and the first night of the new production of Philip Glass's Satyagraha was apparently threatened. Since then the atmosphere has become calmer and Thursday's opening performance was unaffected. This was good news for the company, especially in view of its programme through to the end of the season. As well as a revival of last year's successful On the Town, there are two other new productions to come: Britten's Death in Venice and the Borodin-derived Kismet. Both are potential crowd-pullers, which is what ENO needs when it is trying to get the figures to add up for the 2007-08 season and the Arts Council England is making ominous noises from the wings. The new production of Satyagraha will do the company no harm. People who do not like Glass's music ("detest" is probably the mot juste) will stay away anyway. Those who are attracted to the minimalist style will find the opera handsomely given its due. It is basically well cast and the production, part arty chic, part back-to-basics experimental, has theatrical flair and looks as though it has had some money spent on it. The target audience is the young, pop/classical cross-over crowd, which is wryly amusing, given that the opera is now more than a quarter of a century old. Together with Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha was one of Glass's earliest successes in the opera house. It dates from 1980, when his style really was minimalist in the most stripped-down sense of the term: just simple phrases, like a scale or a few notes of a chord, are repeated over and over for 10 minutes at a time. Glass aficionados regard this as the composer at his purest before he was tempted into composing music with a modicum of variety. (Those who caught his later opera Orphée, a score of real hypnotic power, when it was performed by the Royal Opera at the Linbury Theatre in 2005 may beg to differ.) Let us spare the blushes of the unfortunate singer facing 1,000 repeats of the same phrase who miscounted and sang 1,001. Aside from a few extra squeaks like that, Johnannes Debus, the conductor, and his ENO forces faced up to their 3_-hour ordeal with patience and stamina. Yes, Satyagraha does last that long. Anybody not totally in sync with Glass's expansive timescale might consider some preliminary meditation on the pavement before going in. Glass's theme is Gandhi and here - arguably more than in any of his other stage works - his style finds a soulmate in the opera's central character. In parallel to Gandhi's policy of non-violence, the music is non-interventionist, preferring the restraint of contemplation to getting involved with the cut-and-thrust of a drama. Although the focus is on Gandhi's years in South Africa, there is no plot as such. Events do not occur chronologically; the characters, apart from Gandhi himself, remain faceless objects. The silent presence of Tolstoy, Tagore and Martin Luther King provides a wider context to the opera's theme but only vaguely. Everything has been done to render the subject matter as inscrutable as possible - even down to having the libretto written in Sanskrit. You have to laugh: after all the hullabaloo over whether ENO should keep to its policy of singing everything in English, here it is performing an opera in the original language and nobody seems to have noticed. Perhaps the audience just thought they could not hear the words as usual, though Alan Oke's mellifluous Gandhi sang with unarguable clarity, as did ENO stalwarts such as Janis Kelly, Ashley Holland and Robert Poulton. The production, created in collaboration with Improbable, a theatre company, helps out by projecting translations of crucial passages on the back screen. Director Phelim McDermott has captured the sanctified mood of the opera with simplicity and it was a nice idea to use plain materials, Blue Peter-style, to create the props - especially the delightful giant papier mâché puppets, though the half hour spent showing us what can be done with a dozen spools of sticky tape was perhaps excessive. The result is an atmospheric, visually imaginative show. Satyagraha is ENO's second co-production with the Metropolitan Opera of New York, another company urgently seeking a way forwards for the future. It should do well there.

A mere 27 years after its world premiere in Rotterdam, Philip Glass’s Gandhi opera Satyagraha has finally been staged in London. It has taken the sixtieth anniversary of Indian independence, a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and substantial support from Sky Arts (which dedicates an evening to Glass next Saturday) to bring it about. On the first night, standing ovations greeted the 70-year-old composer as he took his bow. English National Opera was responsible for the staging of Glass’s Akhnaten in 1985, and The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 in 1989. Satyagraha has been long awaited, for it is vintage Glass. The focus on Gandhi’s South African years (1893-1914) and his work for satya graha, or “firmness in championing the truth” through nonviolence, is central to Glass’s own thinking. And, at this phase in his career, his music was in its glorious prime: those repetitive patternings shifting and shining with ingenious rhythmic and melodic ideas, interlocking, overlapping, yet ever calm. The greatness of Satyagraha (and this ENO performance, conducted by Johannes Debus, proves it to be so) is in the perfect marriage of music and subject matter. There’s a sense of striving suspended in stasis; a sense of progress that is not linear, but cyclical and transformational. Or, in the words of the Baghavad-Gita, from which the libretto is made: “This is the fixed, still state which sustains . . . the athletes of the Spirit.” ENO has collaborated with the theatre group Improbable; and Phelim McDermott, directing, with Julian Crouch as assistant director and set designer, have created a masterwork of theatrical intensity and integrity. All three acts take place within an arc-like wall of curving corrugated iron. Within the slow waves of music and human movement, an ensemble of acrobats and puppeteers conjure miracle after miracle. Newsprint looms large: there is a ubiquitous whispering of newspaper as sheets are shifted, read (the founding of Indian Opinion was central to Gandhi’s work) — and then, almost imperceptibly, formed into gigantic papier-mâché puppet-figures of gods, beasts and politicians. High in the iron wall, windows disclose the three iconic figures who watch over the three acts: Tolstoy, Tagore and Martin Luther King. As the last act unfolds, the great wall buckles and disintegrates, leaving a miming silhouette of the preaching King high on his plinth, and the diminutive figure of Gandhi below, singing a simple rising scale — no fewer than 30 times. Image after image is etched indelibly on the memory, in its masterly fusion of the aural and the visual. The beauty of the sung Sanskrit is bewitching: sober sepia projections of key passages replace supertitles; but verbal comprehension isn’t really the point. Although it would be inappropriate to single out individual performances in a work that has so little to do with conventional operatic glory, Alan Oke’s central performance as Gandhi is a masterpiece of compelling clarity and absorption; and he is supported admirably by the magnificent chorus and a cast including the soprano Elena Xanthoudakis as his secretary, Miss Schlesen, the mezzo Anne Marie Gibbons as Kasturbai, his wife, and by Ashley Holland as Mr Kallenbach.

It is, perhaps, a sign of our disillusioned, post-Iraq times that two of this month's most important operatic openings should be works that demand an end to institutional violence and insist we consider peace as an active force for political good. Later in April, the Royal Opera presents its new production of Benjamin Britten's great anti-war drama Owen Wingrave. First off the mark, however, is English National Opera, with the London stage premiere of Satyagraha, Philip Glass's examination of Gandhi's early life in South Africa, and the formation of his doctrine of non-violence in the face of racist imperialism. Its primary aim is to present Gandhi's work and thought as a tremendous achievement within a continuum of non-violent ideology. The text derives from the Bhagavad Gita with its vision of the spiritually secure, peaceful warrior aware of the inviolable divinity within all beings. In keeping with eastern philosophical thought, past, present and future are elided and the narrative glides backwards and forwards through time. Three kindred spirits - Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore and Martin Luther King - are silent observers of Gandhi's mission. The repetitive figurations of Glass's music, meanwhile, act like mantras, and aim to quieten the jangling of our own minds as we watch and listen. It is an astonishingly beautiful work, though some may find Glass's idiom forbidding, and the austere closing pages seem over-protracted. It is impossible, however, to imagine a better execution. There's a striking, vocally impeccable central performance from Alan Oke as Gandhi, and singing of fierce commitment and power from Elena Xanthoudakis as his secretary Miss Schlesen. Conducted by Johannes Debus, the ENO orchestra registers every shift of colour, while the all-important choral singing is electrifying in its precision and weight. Phelim McDermott's staging, undertaken in collaboration with the theatre company Improbable, is also a thing of wonder. The gods of the Hindu pantheon rub shoulders with ordinary humanity. Hope is born from deprivation as sheets of corrugated iron and vast quantities of newsprint are transformed into the symbols of a new order. The ending is very stark: Gandhi and King are suddenly seen against a vista of threatening clouds, an intimation of the impending assassination of both by the forces they opposed. Above all, however, the whole thing serves as a monumental affirmation of human dignity at a time when many have begun to question its very existence - and for that, we must be infinitely grateful. Guardian Guide, April 21 - 27 2007 *Pick of the week, classical and opera Improbable's magical staging of Philip Glass's Ghandi opera is not only the highlight of the London opera season, but the finest thing at ENO in years.