From Gaddafi to Gandhi

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

From Gaddafi to Gandhi: English National Operas current season is bringing new figures into the spotlight.

Mozart, Handel, Puccini and Britten hold their place on ENOs London stage, but Asian Dub Foundation with Gaddafi: A Living Myth and now Philip Glasss Satyagraha: M. K.Gandhi in South Africa have entered the mix, adding the Middle East and Asia to operas traditional European focus.

Its not an entirely new trend: the trail was blazed by American composer John Adams Nixon in China in the mid-1980s, which dealt with the former US Presidents 1972 visit when he met Mao Zedong and other Chinese officials.

Satyagraha (a variety of non-violent resistance - a word invented by Gandhi, but which never caught on) is far less accessible than Nixon. For a start, its in Sanscrit, adapted from the Bhagavada Gita, an ancient text of 700 verses. Secondly, Glasss music is repetitive, restrained, contemplative. So, too, is the onstage action. Thirdly, the interaction is not so much between performers as between performers and audience.

Theres no avoiding it: some people will find this work agonisingly slow and boring, and if you fail to read the programme notes in advance incomprehensible. The critic sitting next to me on the press night said he had no idea what was going on. I, too, was guessing until a snatched bar conversation with a South African woman in the interval provided an explanation as well as some fascinating details about Gandhis life in the racist republic.

But some of the music is mesmeric it was no surprise to learn that Glass has worked with performance artist Laurie Anderson (whose record, O Superman, reached No 2 in the UK pop chart in 1977) - and occasionally brilliant.

In addition, the staging is fascinating and fun, particularly the giant, disturbing papier-mâché figures and the use of paper, designed, as the programme note explains, to play on the role of the newspaper Indian Opinion in the early 1900s. Theres a breathtaking backdrop towards the end when the figures in what appears to be a black and white photograph move. (Theres also an occasional mystifying misfire: a painstakingly constructed web of tape is equally painstakingly rolled up again in a way that suggests a startling image will emerge. It doesnt. You are left wondering why you have been watching the exceedingly slow removal of a prop.)

Above all, however, is the fact that here is an opera about Gandhi, about whom most British people know little; and about a little-known part of his life. It also brings in and links Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (whose letters apparently were a source of support and guidance to Gandhi), Indian poet and thinker Rabindranath Tagore (the only living moral authority acknowledged by Gandhi), and US civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who are cited as "three icons of Satyagrajha").

It would be good to think that this work (written in 1980) is part of a shift in thinking in which India is viewed not as a jewel in the crown, but as a cultural, intellectual, political, economic entity in its own right, on its own terms. (The current stage version of Rohinton Mistry's wonderful novel, A Fine Balance, at the Hampstead Theatre is another example.) You have to work harder watching Satyagraha than you do Monsoon Wedding. But there are rewards to be had.

+ Satyagraha, nine performances from 5 April-1 May, English National Opera, The Coliseum, London. Info: 0870 145 0200/ info@eno.org/ org ENO

+ Satyagraha: Behind the Scenes with Philip Glass, Sky Arts, Channel 267 and Sky Arts HD, Channel 268, 14 April from 9pm. Information: Sky Arts