★★★★★
This really is the kind of production you to take photos of and frame on your wall. Majestic does not even scratch the surface of the aesthetic feast that is Phelim McDermott’s Akhnaten, revived once again by the ENO.
Like composer Philip Glass’ other so-called portrait operas (Satyagraha and Einstein on The Beach) this opera orbits around a singular concept. Akhnaten was a real pharaoh who sparked a paradigm shift in theological order by rejecting the old polytheistic order in favour of monotheistic worship, an idea would reverberate across religions and cultures and nations. Or at least that is the hypothesis that Glass unpicks with his idiosyncratic minimalism.
Glass’ trance like music is a sumptuous sonic puzzle that begs its audience to unlock its power. Without violins an emphasis on heavier tones rumbles and flows with elemental force. Glass’ generous use of arpeggios take on an inquisitive resulting in a score that streams like a train of philosophical thought musing and ruminating. It gorgeously parallels the weighty philosophical battles coiled at the heart of the opera.
It demands loving attention and hard work from its audience, but its more than worth the reward especially with Anthony Roth Costanzo’s mysteriously thrilling performance as the eponymous pharaoh. Costanzo wields total mastery over the space. It’s not just his mesmerising counter tenor, here unravelling in its full mystifying force, but his bird like physicality. He flutters and dances with chirpy glee yet never loses his stately imperiousness as a pharaoh. He is the king, and the king can do as he pleases.
The musical metaphysics dances with the aesthetics in a near perfect harmony. Take the now iconic repetitive professional jugglers who accompany Akhnaten as his posse. Their flying balls rotate in the air exuding cosmic mystery, their eye-catching speed slicing through the rest of the opera’s meditative visual pace. It culminates in the second act’s ‘hymn to the sun’ where a giant glowing celestial orb hovers upstage channelling the presence of a god.
Yet there is something distinctly human underpinning it. Occasionally the jugglers drop a ball, something that seems banal, perhaps even a mistake, but regardless of whether it is deliberate it echoes our own transience as human beings. At the end of the opera Akhnaten is contextualised within history by a chorus of white coated scientists listening to a lecture on sun god. It’s oddly bittersweet. Despite the pharaohs’ longing for immorality only memory, immediately present in the opera house, survives.
The astounding creativity finds its way into Kevin Pollard’s costume design which quotes and adapts motifs from Ancient Egypt, but cleverly opts for symbolism over realism. Hypnotically gorgeous dresses made from plastic baby heads and suits laced with shimmering gold will make you lament the Khepresh going out of fashion.
Words by Alexander Cohen
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