Billy Wilder, asked for his opinion of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of his movie Sunset Boulevard, famously replied: ‘Those boys hit on a great idea. They didn’t change a thing.’ I don’t think you could say exactly that about Netia Jones’s new staging of Philip Glass’s Orphée, a piece that takes the script of Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film and turns it into — well, into an opera by Philip Glass. Cocteau’s shimmering cinematic imagery (think Man Ray come to life) defies physical realisation, so Jones and her designers Lizzie Clachan (sets) and Lucy Carter (lighting) have found poetic, often blindingly beautiful theatrical equivalents. But that apart, Jones takes Wilder’s advice and goes, by and large, with Cocteau and Glass’s haunting, strangely compulsive flow.
As the final instalment of English National Opera’s wildly erratic Orpheus season, that was never a given, and there were a few early wobbles. The programme listed a platoon of unscripted additional characters including ‘Nadia Boulanger’, ‘Einstein on the Beach’ and — here the sinking feeling really set in — ‘Philip Glass’. And then Glass’s music began its familiar chug, the stage filled (the crowd of café-dwellers might have included Glass and Boulanger; from the dress circle it was impossible to tell), and — yes, this came as a surprise — all those cherished prejudices began to ebb.
The first scene was the weakest, with Glass’s music at its most twee and the café crowd, dressed like Marcel Marceau, mugging and miming away in the style that a better critic once characterised as ‘first day at Rada’. Jennifer France’s Princess prowls about in black couture, there’s a roar of motorbikes and suddenly we’re down the rabbit hole, spiralling into the dreamworld where Cocteau and Glass, as well as Jones and her team, all seem to feel most fully at home.
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