REVIEW: Satyagraha at the London Coliseum by Maxine Morse, 14 October 2022

The ENO has produced a sparkling revival of Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha to commence their 2021 Winter season at the London Coliseum. It follows Ghandi’s early career in South Africa and is part cirque du soleil, part mystical experience, part manifesto for radicals.

ENO Satyagraha 2021

A young Gandhi, a suited, suitcased lawyer, ejected from a first-class South African rail carriage sits in a heap besides the road. He depicts the struggles of the immigrant, subjected to small acts of everyday prejudice, shoved, pelted with debris and always being treated as “less than”.

Immigrants are the shoe shining underclasses who pander to the boorish Afrikaners; tattered, dusty, rusty and invisibly blending into the corrugated iron back drop of the set.

Gandhi turns to the holy scripture the Bhagavad-Gita, not to bear his lot, but to plan his movement. When you wage a war with weapons you don’t battle a faceless enemy, you kill your family, friends and neighbours who hold differing viewpoints. The author, Leo Tolstoy provides Gandhi with a formula for winning a revolution in “Letter to a Hindu”, you fight back with love.

Satyagraha means “insistence on truth”. It encompasses methods of passive resistance; the 240 mile Dandi Salt March in 1930 to protest the British imposed salt tax is enacted by peasants, farmers and urban labourers who swish the water with baskets to harvest salt. Gandhi galvanises his supporters with his newsletter, The Indian Opinion which rains on the stage like confetti. The crowds, with trepidation, burn their discriminatory Asian registration certificates in a fire pit.

The libretto (Phelim McDermott and Constance De Jong) is sung in Sanskrit without surtitles, rendering the performance more mime than opera with the Bhagavad-Gita acting as a philosophical and vocal backdrop. Gandhi’s (Sean Panikkar) vocals soar and dip in both hope and spiritual lament.

I had so many questions…some of them more pragmatic than artistic.

• How do you train an English performing chorus to sing in Sanskrit?
• How does Carolyn Kuan, in her debut performance, manage to conduct the obscurest of vocals?

And the questions kept on coming…

I implore you read a plot synopsis. Otherwise, you will spend the first interval queuing for a programme and playing speed-reading-catch-up instead of drinking a gin and tonic in the bar.

Maybe you struggle with non-linear plots and meditative eastern chanting is “all Greek to you”. Maybe you are a person like me! So why venture out on a cold, dark, autumnal night?

Go…this opera is a rare act of beauty, a spiritual tour de force with Glass’s signature minimalist music counterbalanced by a visually spectacular set filled to the rafters with aerialists, grotesque puppets and props crafted out of waste and humble materials.

Go…to be moved by the sheer pathos of a thin, wiry, magnetic man who faced injustice head on to start a movement which changed the world.

Satyagraha ENO – to book tickets go to the ENO website.

Maxine Morse  wrote this review of Satyagraha as part of her opera critics training at the English National Opera. To see other reviews from her training see The Valkyrie, HMS Pinafore, The Handmaid’s Tale, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Cunning Little Vixen and La Boheme.

Blog • See