L’Orfeo review – Kentridge’s exhilarating creativity animates compelling Monteverdi

Glyndebourne festival
A visual whirlwind accompanies charismatic and stylish performances in William Kentridge’s new staging. In the pit, Jonathan Cohen and the OAE add light and shade

There is a lot to look at in Glyndebourne’s first production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Directed by William Kentridge with a set by Sabine Theunissen, this staging is rooted in an artist’s studio and borne along by objects and images. Some are three-dimensional, real-life: ladders, chairs, sketchbooks, a mid-century desk lamp. Some are cartoonishly 2D or purely symbolic (placards shaped like oak-leaves, concertinas of coloured cardboard, big sheets of paper printed with Kentridge’s own work, an oversized metal cone used as a loudhailer). And many are projected on to the back wall of the stage in a video (designed by Janus Fouché) that starts before the first note of Monteverdi’s score and runs throughout as a constant, often hyperactive spool of Kentridge’s animated charcoal drawings, annotated archive documents and fragmentary phrases.

The cumulative effect is overwhelming – particularly if you want to read the surtitles. Some may find the visual busyness frustrating, its symbolism gnomic. (I remain foxed, I confess, by the repeated images of telephones and the map of Johannesburg.) And there are a few scenes in which the animated whirlwind seems to make up for a shortfall of drama embodied by the singers. But elsewhere the connection between stage and screen is clearer. Kentridge has the figure of Music (who in this production also sings the minimal vocal lines allotted to Euridice) painting at a desk throughout, as if generating the projections and with them the opera’s world. Euridice has a dancing counterpart performed by Roseline Wilkens, who is captivating onstage as she whirls and lunges, but also spins across the projections as an animated sketch. There is something exhilarating about a production so determined to match the Orpheus myth’s own obsession with the power and dangers of sensory overload – from music helping Orpheus into the underworld to the fact that the final catastrophe is caused by a single desperate glance.