Written for Culture Wars
Have you ever felt – and I mean, really felt – the four laws of thermodynamics? What about Snell’s Law of Refraction? Brownian motion?
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s iconic opera, first seen in 1976 and currently being restaged at the Barbican for a belated UK premiere, makes you physically feel Einstein’s theory of relativity. You might emerge with no better explanation of its scientific basis, but, for four and a half hours at least, you live it. It leaves a very different understanding – couched in experience – as to how a single event can occur at different moments for different observers.
True, we aren’t in motion for the duration, but even sat still you fall entirely out of everyday time. It is a headswirling Alice in Wonderland experience that needs its frustrations as much as its delirium. It can be carbonated helium and leaden cement; swimming with dolphins and sinking in quicksand.
Throughout, Einstein – the grey-wisped, tongue-wagging icon – appears at the front of the stage, looping this itchy motif on his violin. This is, one assumes, him on the beach, reminiscing over his life as staged behind him. However, as narrative in any conventional sense, it’s only infinitesimally tangible: there’s a snap of childhood, another of blackboard scribblings, a couple possibly of love, perhaps some dancing molecules. Really, it’s a series of staged sculptures – tableaux doesn’t quite cut it – expressive of his life and work.
For me, the experience divided in two; music and staging. This is curious because the two elements are so entwined, so of the same ilk, that it’s hard to imagine them separated. Yet, while I found Glass’s compositions thrilling – and being frank, I doubt I would have done with the staging – Wilson’s staging felt to me rather jaded. This can only be the result of my experience of the one form and almost total naivety of the other.
To start with the music. It has the rhythms of a scratched DVD, snagging on a sequence, which is almost escapes, only to fall back into another one. It’s as if you anticipate where melody needs to go to satisfy, but each time it turns back, loops in on itself. Imagine a scale with the top and bottom notes left off, played repeatedly for five or more minutes. Numbers are sung rhythmically. Sections grate and frustrate, before you settle into them and, then, most remarkably, they settle into you. Your body takes on the rhythms, your blood starts pumping in time. Then it snags or trips into some other rhythm. Just as one sequence becomes neutral, present but unobtrusive, you have to get used to another. It really is an astonishing experience.
And Wilson’s staging matches it perfectly with its stillness and its ceaslessness. A lifesize cut-out train inches its way across the Barbican’s huge stage. A crowd coalesces, looks up, looks down, and then disperses. Dancers dressed in white spring across the stage like sine waves or a stream of electrons. A vast strip of white light aches its way from horizontal to vertical. Each scene lasts around twenty minutes and each is so constant that it feels like looking at a picture until cross-eyed and blinking to find some subtle detail has changed. Open your eyes and the Mona Lisa’s winking.
The combined effect is not just hypnotic, but mind-draining; a brain enema. The pleasure is in slipping out of time entirely.
That’s partly down to its elusiveness as content as well as its form. The slide is from Einsteinian physic into consumer capitalism, as rolling monologues about air-conditioned supermarkets and such. If we can control the way you experience time, it seems to hint, we can control the things you buy. After all, isn’t time only felt in terms of urges and variations? We live from need to need or change to change.
However, the staging – so very serious at all times – also feels rather passé. It’s repetition before repetition was cool. Arguably, even before it was tried and tested. There are some striking moments of elegant simplicity – a moon that waxes and wanes over the course of a single fleeting yet endless encounter – but the po-faced avant-garde of old hasn’t the playful smirk that keeps it light. Only the last of Christopher Knowles’ text – a gorgeous love-story that serves as an antidote to clinicalism and capitalism – is readily comprehensible.
Truthfully, I stuck with it for four hours and then, so spun by its philosophizing about time, I popped out the other side. From this angle, the blank-faced lack of expression in performance is completely destructive and the whole starts to look like a routine to be churned through. Lucinda Childs dances, like an exercise class. They are chess pieces and dancing monkeys, and the performance drifted into the background and out of focus. Foregrounded instead, was a calculation of the amount of time I spend in a theatre annually.
It’s around twenty days, in case you were wondering. Sometimes it’s like swimming with dolphins. Sometimes it’s like sinking in quicksand.
Photograph: Lucie Jansch
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