ENO’s Mask of Orpheus is a triumph. It’s also unintelligible. Even David Pountney, who produced the original ENO staging in 1986, admitted to me in the interval that he didn’t have a clue what Harrison Birtwistle’s opera was about. But who cares when, visually and musically, you’re being socked between the eyes? Mask makes sense in the same way an earthquake makes sense.
Fittingly we begin with total nonsense: Orpheus, in the bath, attempting to reform language. This is Orpheus the Man, in red velour and gelled-up hair, looking like Rod Stewart. An unlikely charmer of fishes and trees, it has to be said. But soon enough another Orpheus pops up: Orpheus the Myth, looking even worse, like Rod Stewart’s drunk dad. This one can barely charm his own wife, let alone the fishes or trees.
The third Orpheus we see, ripped and tattooed, is Orpheus the Hero. ‘Hubba hubba’, you can almost hear the fishes and trees murmur. This deliberate sandwiching of different versions of the myth by Birtwistle and his librettist Peter Zinovieff should confuse. It doesn’t — not immediately. Indigestion comes only as the story acquires more and more fillings — including every one of the four variants on Orpheus’s death. Yet with every retreat from narrative sense comes more room for the visual and musical.
Some will claim the result is oversaturation in all the corde lisse, mime, dance, frantic projections, the sinister battalions of rubber Hattie Jacqueses and pink Benjamin Franklins. Possibly. But it’s hard not to be awed by the costume creations of Daniel Lismore. The gasps were audible in the third act with the arrival of the fuchsia pink Teletubbies — heads shaped like blocks, cones, globes and parcels — who bounced and jiggled across the stage.
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