2 days ago
Orpheus and Eurydice review — Gluck gets the circus treatment
Christoph Willibald Gluck was the 18th-century German composer who wanted to strip opera of show-off vocal virtuosity and convoluted plot twists and instead present unvarnished themes — love, loss, death — in unvarnished music. With Orpheus and Eurydice he achieved that goal with a concise, noble and austere masterpiece of an opera.
So it's jolting, to put it mildly, to have that pared-down sensibility harnessed in Yaron Lifschitz's Playhouse staging (brought to the Edinburgh International Festival by Opera Queensland) to something so different in mood and aesthetic that at first you can hardly believe your eyes. While the two protagonists — the indestructible countertenor Iestyn Davies and the peachy-toned soprano Samantha Clarke — deliver Gluck's music in fine style, aided by the excellent Scottish Opera Chorus and Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Laurence Cummings's direction, 11 acrobats from the Brisbane-based Circa company tumble and twist around them, forming a kind of gymnastic commentary on the story.
The acrobats from Circa in action
JESS SHURTE
At least, that's what they sometimes do. It's easy to spot the visual metaphors when, for instance, during the overture a woman acrobat does a long, twisty plunge down a suspended rope, clearly evoking Eurydice's descent to the underworld. Or to feel the physical power of the scene where Orpheus, following her to Hell, is taunted by figures dashing around him like demented animals. Or indeed to be impressed by the counterintuitive finale, where Gluck's happy ending is undercut by a literally bloody coup de théâtre.
Elsewhere, however, it's more difficult to relate the acrobats' frenetic activities — cartwheeling, leapfrogging, contorting and forming ever more improbable human pyramids — either to the story or the music's generally sombre mood. Nor could I fathom why Eurydice was briefly transformed into a vampy cabaret singer, or why some of the action took place in a garden greenhouse.
Did that matter, though? The audience in the packed Playhouse continually gasped at the heart-in-mouth daring of the acrobats and gave the show a standing ovation. So at least Gluck got his biggest cheer for centuries.
★★★☆☆
80min
Edinburgh Playhouse, to Aug 16,
