Re-unveiling of Festival’s past glory can be mesmerising when it works
Seventy this year, the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) is looking back to several past glories, one of them Mark-anthony Turnage’s opera Greek, unveiled to the UK for the first time at the 1988 festival. It’s since become a contemporary classic, its reputation for uncompromising, in-your-face aggression well deserved – and just what you’d expect from a work based on Steven Berkoff ’s rabid updating of the Oedipus myth to the squalor of Thatcher’s London.
For the 2017 EIF’S re-unveiling – a co-production between Scottish Opera and new company Opera Ventures – directing duties fall to young English firebrand Joe Hill-gibbins. It was he who staged A Midsummer Night’s
Dream at the Young Vic in a mudbath and filled a stage with sex dolls for
Measure for Measure. He’s clearly a man for high concepts and big gestures. For Greek, his concept is a vast white wall, which not only forces all the action into our faces at the very front of the stage, but also magically revolves, sticking out so far over the orchestra pit that it misses the head of conductor Stuart Stratford by inches.
It’s also this wall that serves as the backdrop for live video projections, created by the cast in a kind of video Foley booth nestled in among the orchestra – memorably a stomachchurning concoction of baked beans, ketchup, HP sauce, gobbets of salad cream and live maggots, all conveying the grubby Tufnell Park background of anti-hero Eddy. Later, the heavily made-up head of what appears to be a sex doll comes into view, then a gargantuan, oily teddy bear.
It’s all very provocative and alienating – and highly successful, it has to be said, especially when combined with Hill-gibbins’s gaudy cartoonish trio of singers playing family, cops and café owners. It’s also a mite too pristine, however, for such a foul-mouthed, scuzzy work, and despite his visual flamboyance, there are stretches where Hill-gibbins seems unsure what to do with his cast, simply leaving them standing singing blankly at the audience.
It’s a very strong cast none the less, headed by baritone Alex Otterburn as an aptly swaggering, needy Eddy, with Susan Bullock in gloriously grotesque form as his (supposed) mother, and Allison Cook darkly seductive as the woman who becomes his wife. In the pit, Stuart Stratford has a lot of fun with Turnage’s jagged, angular score but brings a wonderful sensuality to the music, too.
It’s a bold, brave production, just as uncompromising as Turnage’s opera. And, like the opera, when it works it’s mesmerising – but when it doesn’t, it falls a bit flat.