Heart of glass
Michael Tanner
Satyagraha Coliseum
Whatever one thinks about Philip Glass’s music in general, and Satyagraha in particular, it does tend to get extremely well served, and never better than by ENO at the Coliseum, where this opera is receiving its London stage première. The company responsible for mounting it is Improbable, which specialises in improvisation, though my impression of Satyagraha was that it had been thoroughly rehearsed, as it needs to be to be at all tolerable. In their note in the programme, the directors of Improbable state that ‘theatre is too important to take too seriously: we trust in the creativity of the artists who make work with us’. That kind of bemusing non sequitur is par for the course with experimental companies, but it is at least worth noting their contrast of seriousness and importance, when you might expect both concepts to be on the same side, and the buzz word ‘creativity’ used merely to fill a gap in thought. Clearly when Improbable get working they take things very seriously. One wishes they had had a more deserving object than Satyagraha to get working on, though the tone in which the two directors discuss it with Philip Reed in an interesting and provocative interview, also in the programme, suggests that it is just the kind of thing they like. The lack of narrative ‘in the conventional sense’ is bound to be alluring for such a team. As Phelim McDermott, one of the directors, says, ‘It’s multi-layered and non-linear: you could almost enter the piece at any point and experience the whole thing.’ Taking my cue from that encouraging remark, and substituting ‘exit’ for ‘enter’, I left after Act II also because it was running even later than one expects at ENO, and the hour-long Act III wasn’t going to start until after 10 o’clock. I can’t believe that anything that happened — or, more likely, failed to — in Act III could have done anything to alleviate the desperate boredom which I was suffering by then, had been since about 20 minutes after curtain-up.
I realise that with my addiction to narrative in the conventional sense, to intelligible events causally related, and, if it’s an opera, to music which is relevant to those events, I disqualify myself as completely as possible from benefiting from Glass’s operas, just as, with my equal addiction to thinking in a logical sequence, to ‘binary opposites’ such as good versus bad, true versus false, I render myself unable to appreciate the excerpts from the Bhagavadgita which were projected on to the surround: what are presumably thoughts about everything strike me as thoughts about nothing in particular. And though Glass’s music might well be uniquely suited, at least so far as Western music goes, to the inculcation of such thoughts or attitudes, there is the problem that a great deal of his work which deals with quite different subjects from Satyagraha does sound very similar. Of course people who are attracted to his music often tend to be drawn to what are vaguely known as ‘Eastern’ or ‘Indian’ ways of thought, but if such a term as ‘appropriateness’ is one they find useful, one wonders whether the philosophy of non-violence, which is — more or less, I hasten nervously to add — what satyagraha connotes, is most appropriately expressed by music which is repetitive to a point where even the most easygoing person might become uncharacteristically aggressive.
In some sense Satyagraha portrays or refers to dramatic events, each of the acts having an iconic figure, in sequence Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore and Martin Luther King. The first and last of these had famously stormy and dramatic lives, and insofar as they preside over the outer acts, it is not only as inspirations for nonviolence and as being therefore related to Gandhi, the figure who is at the centre of the piece, but also as reminders of the hostile world which they faced. They help to point Satyagraha in the direction of drama, though it is, or I think it is, meant to induce a state which is at least analogous to or a forerunner of the goal of meditation, where any kind of conflict is transcended. So this opera is both about the world to which these non-violent men were such a contrast, and also an attempt to make its audience see what their state of mind was, even to share it. I don’t see that any work could achieve both these aims.
ENO’s decision not only to perform Satyagraha in the original ancient Sanskrit but also to leave it unsurtitled, which might seem perverse in view of its otherwise universal practice of performing in English and providing surtitles, presumably indicates that it sees the work as inducing a certain state of mind, and not as offering anything intelligible or to be assessed by the kind of criteria its audiences would otherwise employ. So I can only repeat what I said at the start, that the performance, in its confidence, smooth running, its use of gifted performers with beautiful voices eloquently chanting, is hard to imagine bettered. I found it a paralysing waste of time, but clearly many members of the audience were stirred enough to emerge from their meditative state and roar their appreciation.
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