Jack Symonds's composition, Louis Garrick's libretto, and Kip Williams's direction transform the ancient epic of Gilgamesh into a modern theatrical masterpiece. The production explores themes of glory, partnership, defiance, loss, and spiritual transformation through music, movement, and stunning visual effects.
With a mere five singers, eleven instrumentalists and a cavernous space, composer Jack Symonds, librettist Louis Garrick and director Kip Williams have reforged an ancient epic into modern theatre of tumult and transcendence, rage and tenderness, destruction and creation.tells of his earthly glory in the city of Uruk, partnership with Enkidu, defiance of nature and gods, and journey to the netherworld in search of meaning.
With designers Elizabeth Gadsby , David Fleischer and Amelia Lever-Davidson’s barrage of lights at the back and sides, Williams fills the wide stage with discerning skill, creating a forest of obstacles and fears, a glittering palace, and, at the close a path of diminishing light towards to the infinite.
The visual effects are arresting, inventive and occasionally humorous. Garrick’s text is epigrammatic and remote, populated with strange names, age-old metaphors and gnomic wisdom. Yet it is Symonds wide-ranging and varied score that energises and paces the drama, drawing us in to a world of writhing strangeness, urging the action forward with sharply accented intensity, drawing it back with unexpected sensuousness, and, at the end, sustaining a long expanse of spiritual transformation.
For the outstanding cast, Symonds has crafted a vocal style unique to each singer. Jeremy Kleeman’s Gilgamesh is, in one sense, the most vocally straight, singing with chiselled strength in well-formed phrases. By contrast, Mitchell Riley, as Enkidu, flits between bestial howls, penetrating falsetto, eerie double notes and an earthy humanity, devoid of godly pretension.Jane Sheldon’s main role is Ishtar goddess of love and war.
The themes of overreach, destruction of nature and rebirth through love have some parallels with Wagner’sSymonds, Garrick and Williams have reimagined those themes with striking contemporary relevance.
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