Seated in the usual critical position in front of the lighting box of Traverse One, this reviewer observed to his (considerably more) learned colleague from Opera Now that Phillip Glass’s music is something of a Marmite test – you either think it some of the most exciting music of our times, or you … well, don’t. That the auditorium was near capacity for this single performance of Glass’s opera ‘In The Penal Colony’ suggest a considerable following in this city at least.
‘In The Penal Colony’, based on a short story by Franz Kafka, is a darkly tinged and deeply disturbing examination of morality, complicity and human weakness that asks penetrating questions about what it may be to judge and justify.
Glass’s score is never less than perfectly matched to Rudolph Wurlitzer’s libretto and the singers – Michael Bennett and Omar Ebrahim – bring a full realisation to their characterisations. Chamber opera has rarely been more intensely up close and personal than in the cultural and moral clashes their characters embody.
As The Officer seeks to explain the colony’s method of execution to The Visitor, Glass’s score and our own realisations of the horrors implied grow in intensity. The moral dilemma and choices faced by The Visitor become more deeply our own as Ebrahim’s Officer reiterates his possessive affair with both the instrument of torture and the cultural milieu it represents. Gerald Tyler’s non-vocal Condemned Man gives a fine physical presence which both Bennett’s and Ebrahim’s characters play with and against to perfection.
Michael McCarthy’s direction and Michael Rafferty’s conducting bring their own particular lights to bear on the surrounding darkness; the result is never less than startling in its incandesce.
Music Theatre Wales’ stripped down production and Simon Banham’s design realises the piece brilliantly, offering a razor-sharp view of Glass’s bleak vision of our compromised morality. In our straitened times of ethical uncertainty, this is an opera which deserves to be heard in every sense.
Show time: 16 November 2010 only