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Opera review: State with a structural flaw

The power struggle between the law and the individual is obscured in a misjudged reworking of Sophocles’s ‘Theban’ plays, says YVONNE LYSANDROU

Thebans 

The Coliseum, London WC2

3/5

THEBANS opens with a striking tableau, as the cast form a Greek frieze evoking the Parthenon while the vertical columns of Tom Pye’s set evokes a Greek landscape, past and present, as shadowy faces light up the stone. 

It’s a visual image entirely in keeping with Sophocles’s three sequential “Theban” plays — Oedipus, Oedipus At Colonus and Antigone — which focus on the fate of Oedipus and his daughter Antigone (Julia Sporsen). 

Murder and incest, political ambition, love and loyalty, hatred and revenge drive everyone on a collision course which can only lead to catastrophe. 

Here the plays are arranged into three acts, although composer Julian Anderson moves Antigone to Act 2 — not a convincing choice as the entombment of Antigone and Creon’s final realisation and lament is a more fitting ending than the death of Oedipus. 

While the chorus delivers a powerful sonic wave in its interpretation of Frank McGuinness’s sparse and muscular libretto, less successful is the lengthy recitative, where the performers and baritone Roland Wood as Oedipus relate the plot. 

Wood’s voice is at times on the thin side but this is not the case with Matthew Best’s Tiresias, whose resonant and imposing bass, depth of expression and unnerving presence as a richly upholstered epicene oracle is continuously compelling. 

The police-state set design for Antigone has been done before and seems rather at odds with the ambiguity of the McGuinness libretto and Peter Hoare’s portrayal of Creon, which suggests he is less a state dictator than a man bringing a shattered Thebes back to former glory. It’s an authority which is challenged by Antigone when she insists on burying her brother Polynices (Jonathan McGovern), declared a traitor to the new state by Creon, against his orders.

Sophocles doesn’t provide easy answers — Creon has a point in asserting the rule of law and state stability but so does Antigone in privileging the family and the individual. 

The conflict between the two is finely wrought by both singers but the shock in this second act is its brevity. It lasts barely 20 minutes and again raises questions as to Anderson’s choice of emphasis in structuring the opera. 

Antigone, after all, is the play above all others that has fascinated philosophers, writers, artists and composers as its central conflict continues to resonate throughout the centuries. Surely it merits more than this cursory treatment. 

Runs until June 3. Box office: (020) 7845-9300. 

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