OPERA REVIEW: Illuminating Orpheus - The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester.

Mixing Greek myth, shadow puppetry and French art song, “Illuminating Orpheus” is a delicate little chamber opera with a very contemporary driving force. Presented by Lights On Theatre, this performance was at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester.

The stage was simply laid out with a piano and a pianist, Matthew Lau, to one side, and a white screen across the entire width of the space. The projection on the screen declared us to be at a university conference for a particularly obscure and nonsensical branch of musicology. The presenting lecturer, Oliver, shambled onto the stage. He was a rather eccentric young man with a lot of personal issues, and a propensity to taking swigs out of a flask. This was a spoken, and the actor, Keir Lundy, was tautly electric, keeping the through line of the piece going and revealing himself to be a bit of an unreliable narrator.

He was doing a talk about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and his wife was supposed to be there to sing some Eurydice songs, but she hadn’t shown up. Several young women and a young man did come on at various times to sing in French, and the screen began to show shadow puppetry illustrating the Orpheus myth. The puppets and scenes of towns and buildings were in the woodcut illustration style, with a lot of filigree work, and some movement. The performers also represented the characters behind the screen, their silhouettes usually in profile. The songs themselves were Louis Durey’s musical settings of Apollinare’s poems. The singing was beautiful, though as many of the poems are about animals, and there were no subtitles, there would be giraffes or other creatures wandering across the screen for no apparent reason and that was a bit confusing. Aidan McCusker performed Orpheus, Barbara Diesel performed Eurydice, Anusha Merrin Bobby and Keren Hadas were in supporting roles.

The professor lost interest in his presentation and began comparing himself to Orpheus, on the grounds that he is a genius-level but underappreciated novelist, and he has just lost his beautiful wife – though due to an “It’s over” text message, rather than a snakebite. Eventually he wandered off, and his wife Una wandered on, to tell the story from Eurydice’s point of view.

Sarah Ampil - who has a richly vibrant singing voice as well as being a calmly poised actor, took us through the history of a modern and unhappy young woman who dropped out of music school to marry a demanding and narcissistic young man. There is also mention of a growing amorous attachment to her best friend Ari, and Rebecca Anderson played this character behind the screen. She became Una's dark shadow, and there was some very nice interaction between the two that broke through the screen wall. She brought the story all the way up to the musicology conference, and then left us there.

There wasn’t really a resolution: it was more like a yin and yang adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Samuel Herriman wrote the script, giving it a dark psychological truth. Spark Sanders Robinson designed the puppetry. The audience enjoyed it immensely.

Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 11.11.23