Ambition and desire. Sacrifice and death. Vengeance and violence. Justice and regeneration. Repeat.
Greek drama is so hot right now. It’s not only Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: Robert Icke’s Oedipus went to Broadway this year after a successful UK season, and Simon Stone’s Simon Stone’s The Oresteia opened in London this month. Last month in Sydney David Wenham performed An Iliad at Sydney Theatre Company and now, at Carriageworks, we have Liza Lim’s operatic take on Aeschylus’s blood-soaked revenge cycle.
Opera is the perfect format for this ancient drama about a king who sacrifices his teen daughter to save his ship and win a war; a queen who plots 10 years to kill her husband for that crime; and their son, Orestes, who kills his mother and is hunted down and served justice by the Furies. How better to evoke the engulfing emotions and fritzed nervous system of grief, the hot madness of rage, than with the full body?
In Sydney Chamber Opera’s staging of Lim’s 1993 opera, directed by Imara Savage, the singers’ bodies shake, flail, lurch; the sound seems to spasm upwards from their core, vomiting outwards in gasps and groans, and stuttering through clenched and chattering teeth. Memory is possession; grief is an exorcism. Dressed in black funerary garb and pale as ghosts, they sprawl on chairs and stagger around a funeral parlour that’s like David Lynch’s Red Room via Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel and Severance: a purgatory of fluorescent lights and low ceilings that perhaps nobody can escape.
Sitting veiled on a dais at the front of the parlour is Cassandra, who foresaw the events, and in whose mind’s eye or memory this play is taking place. Sitting to one side is a young teen in a white wedding dress and veil, watching. Her time will come.
Lim’s first opera, written in her mid-20s, is extraordinary. It’s aurally challenging, yes; how else to express the emotional truth of the material than with this discombobulating and confronting cacophony of sound? But there are many passages of beauty and lyricism, and an exhilarating wildness.
There are unusual instruments and sounds – an electric guitar, a Turkish saz (via synthesiser in this production), a steel pan – and conventional instruments played in unexpected ways (the electric guitar sounds as though it’s speaking in tongues; the flautist vocalises through her piccolo while playing). Voices are improbably stretched and frayed and unleashed in lucent cries and moans, and bright wailing.
The music is, by all accounts, incredibly challenging to perform; but this production, conducted by SCO’s Jack Symonds, gives you front-row seats to vocal and instrumental virtuosity. Carriageworks’ Bay 20 is small enough that you can watch the 11 members of ELISION Ensemble closely as they play and occasionally vocalise. Similarly, the six singers, including the SCO stalwarts Jane Sheldon, Jessica O’Donoghue, Simon Lobelson and Mitchell Riley, pull out all the stops, putting not only their vocal cords but their bodies on the line in a physically demanding, choreographic performance.
None of this works without the set, designed by Charles Davis and lit by Alexander Berlage, both masters of lush and unsettling cinematic imagery. We need to be fully engrossed in this world and story. The genius of the design is revealed as chairs are scattered, chandelier lights flicker, and tiles of scarlet carpet are peeled away to reveal dirt beneath. Bones will be exhumed; a body will be buried. Flowers will grow on the grave. The Furies will be appeased.
Lim and Barrie Kosky, who directed the premiere performance, drew from Tony Harrison’s acclaimed translation to condense Aeschylus’s three plays’ worth of drama into an hour – though those who emerge from the other end of this journey may find it hard to believe it has been so brief. If there’s one word of caution for viewers, it’s to get across the characters and basic plot in advance; the libretto, like much chamber opera, is poetry and incantation.
In the wake of Covid and amid a cost-of-living crisis, audiences and theatre companies have become more cautious. Almost everywhere you look, main stages are safe zones, bearing classics and adaptations of bestselling IP and marquee names. The new works are often undernourished, starved of development time and budget.
There are always daring artists killing themselves to make visionary work on a shoestring but works of scale whose execution matches their ambition are thin on the ground. This is one of them.
The Oresteia runs until 31 July at Carriageworks
