April at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2007 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web

Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, The Coliseum

Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” is an astonishing musical meditation on the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi. I saw it at the English National Opera at the Coliseum, and it is the best thing I’ve seen there so far.

Glass’s music is mesmerising and hypnotic, though by this I do not mean it is dreamy – it never strays into becoming a soporific. It is dense with seemingly a thousand different melodies, movements and instruments, waves of which glide over and under and into each other. In the latter acts, sudden changes in time signature or key realign the music’s direction at crucial points. Tiny moments, which became huge aspects, of Gandhi’s life, such as the moment he is thrown off a train for daring to sit in first class, are stretched and magnified and performed in exquisite slow motion. Every piece of emotion in these episodes is expressed and felt as the actors chant and sing their way through them, their voices interweaving, at one with the reedy clarinets and flutes.

The staging is endlessly engaging. Reams of newspaper litter the stage, to be variously transformed into the mythic warrior King Arjuna and the charioteer/Krishna from the Hindu text “Bhagavad Gita”, screens for snippets of the opera’s text to be projected onto, and the churning printing presses of Indian opinion themselves. Candlelight, dancing cows made of woven baskets, cellophane gods appear and dissolve as if a part of the music, morphing continuously.

One of the best pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Roundhouse