By Giuseppe Marasco
Venice began by seeking refuge from the savage Barbarians who ransacked Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire, from the very beginning the Venetian lagoon offered a refuge to her people. As a Republic it owe everything to the sea, it’s independence, it’s wealth It’s beauty. It was the material gate way between the East and the world. By nature tough cunning people for whom every turn of the wave was a reminder how fragile their fortunes were. The story of a shipwrecked mariner would echo in a direct personal way, private fears or loss of family at sea and the difficulty of returning home after so long away. They must have seen themselves in Ulysses, whose quality above all else is that of a modern thinking man, and he is modern because his thinking quality is a democratic one based on merit and application.
The Odyssey would have been sung as poetry, performed in Opera it’s a treat for any one who loves this epic, closer to how it was experienced in ancient times, recited in festivals.
Does a great job of linking the chorus (the Roundhouse community choir and Thurrock Community Chorus) to the democratic resonances of this Opera, the first populist mass public version ever created. In their flashing golden cloaks these mad cult devotees, turn in an instant into refuges. The turn from frivolous luxury to this fraught and fragile state is shocking yet remains bound through the performance, flipping again later as gold boat shaped paper crowns are worn as the climax of rediscovery inches closer.
The Opera begins with L’humana Fragilità (Human Frailty) a Gentle melancholic wave with a pendulum like rhythm, cradling fragile human existence.
Packed with great character such as Irus the Lord of the gluttons (an extreme favorite and possibly one of the greatest comic inventions ever), the young lovers, Penelope referencing the stars & Ulysses disturbed and unbelieving of his arrival on Ithaca’s shore.
Irus, the Lord of the Gluttons is a sickly pukey spectre of gargantuan proportions, a Pantagruel character extracted from an ultra Bottom (Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson) Possessing massive tattoos on his calves, forearms, backs of hands, and a pig’s head on the back of his head – fearsome as it is excessive, signal (a brutal) pride and to ward off hunger in the way that Face Masks are worn to ward off Bengal Tigers. He sings mocking the shepherd, grossly interrupting standard images of idyllic poetry “Dear Shepard, I eat your friends…” while joyfully stabbing several sheep on stage.
The style of acting in Opera is a naturalistic gestural, close to silent film. It has a most affecting cathartic quality.
Penelope’s maid Melanto (Melantho),while dancing around the circular track of this production in the round she sings with her lover the most joyful and playful lines of the Opera ,“We will all win in the game that love has devised for us!”. When captured in her lovers arms she sings of his “Silver tongue” these are transformed from words to an ever increasing intensity of muscular pleasure (the textual, physical quality transmogrifying by their musicality
are emphasized through repetition underscoring the magical wishful thinking by teasing out their musicality, turning an idea into reality by words alone, has a powerfully enchanting and doubling effect). Verging on a spasm. Exquisite sensuality.
For Melanto, Penelope’s obsession, is an illusion that will undo her. Yet she also sing that “Love will bind us” as her climax, the paradoxicality of the blind confidence of their infinite youth and the urgency in which Melanto insists “Her [Penelope’s] obsession, is an illusion that will undo her.”
Indeed when we meet Penelope it is a solemne encounter, after 20 years she has turned into an ashen ghost, kind hearted and thoughtful Queen harassed by greedy suitors. On the night Christine Rice acted while her voice was supplied from the orchestra pit by Caitlin Hulcup. This had an interesting effect by adding the sense of a dislocated heart reporting itself from afar, adding a sense of suffocation and suffering unheard, I doubt that this would be incorporated into another revival yet remains memorable for the effect rendered.
In a most powerful scene Roderick Williams as forceful, eloquent Ulysses encounters the shores of Ithaca in such a traumatised state, that he imagines his mind as turned, that the gods in one last final torture have turned his sweet dream of returning home into their device, he fears they have reached into him and plucked from his dreams this hope and finally mock him with a sick illusion. It is indeed powerful to see a man to hit by so much pain, by the inability to process that he is home. All his sense of self, his fame, his prestige collapse as he hits the shore and progresses towards his capital.
I went away wishing for a copy of Christopher Cowell’s new translation of the libretto.
Insightful intro presented by Erica McKoy and baritone Roderick Williams, The Royal Opera’s production of The Return of Ulysses
http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/the-return-of-ulysses-by-john-fulljames