French director Richard Brunel may have chosen the elegant Athénée Theatre for his production of Philip Glass‘s chamber opera, but it couldn’t be further from the gilt-and-plush world of traditional opera. Based on Kafka’s short story of the same name, the piece is a two-handed drama between a gentleman traveller touring a remote island prison and one of the outpost’s authoritarian commanders. The visitor has been invited to witness a public execution performed by a sinister ‘apparatus’, whose cruel and unusual punishment is losing its popularity under the colony’s new regime. Glass’s taut, pulsing score, performed here by the Opéra National de Lyon’s string quintet, is at once a recreation of the workings of the torture machine and a soundscape of the claustrophobia of colonial existence. Meanwhile Brunel, seizing on the themes of spectatorship and complicity suggested by Kafka’s story, confronts the audience with a machine that resembles a nightmarish theatre set – complete with curtains – in a stark parallel that forces the audience to examine its own role in the horrors unfolding on stage.
Performed in English.
Until 17 April.
© Jean-Louis Fernandez
© Jean-Louis Fernandez
