Gilgamesh
Opera Australia, Sydney Chamber Opera and Carriageworks
September 26
Until October 5
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★

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.

Inscribed on clay tablets dating back at least four millennia, the story of Gilgamesh 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. Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third man; Enkidu, “born of silence”, is half man, half beast.

Symonds and Garrick locate the tale at the intersection of the natural, the human and the divine worlds, making each act a transformation in which Gilgamesh moves from god-like pretensions to human love, and then, after human loss, to value the natural world. Ur-Shanabi, boatman over the Waters of Death, says pityingly towards the end that he “had everything but couldn’t see what was precious”.

With designers Elizabeth Gadsby (set), David Fleischer (costumes – when they hadn’t removed them) 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 (literally) glittering palace, and, at the close a path of diminishing light towards 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.

The musical language draws on modernist angularity and dissonance, caressing romantic lines, trite triumphalism, beckoning depth and the strangeness of electronic transformation (Benjamin Carey and Bob Scott).

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.