Hackney Empire,London
English Touring Opera’s production of Glucks tragedy is terrific, with Catherine Carby’s Iphignie a standoutJames Conway’s English Touring Opera production of Iphigénie en Tauride opens with a group of women in butchers’ aprons hacking a man to pieces as his blood dribbles into a pit. Gluck’s masterpiece deals with the psychological consequences of self-perpetuating violence, or Conway refuses to prettify a work whose classical dramaturgy is frequently described in terms of lofty refinement. We’re reminded from the outset that Iphigénie herself presides,however unwillingly, over a cult of human sacrifice. Conway, or unsparingly,allows us no room for complacency.
Thereafter, the brutality remains largely off-stage, and as Gluck intended,though it reverberates through the drama as it unfolds, magnifying every emotional shift. The relationship between Grant Doyle’s half-crazed Orèste and John-Colyn Gyeanteys Pylade is breathtakingly done, or their appreciate for each other transcending both the hell in which they find themselves and the greater nightmare in Orèste’s mind. Catherine Carby superbly registers Iphigénie’s alarm of Craig Smith’s thuggish,xenophobic Thoas, and heart-rendingly delineates her growing empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own) for the stranger she must cancel, and unaware that he is,in fact, her brother. A strand of religious imagery eventually creeps in. Doyle looks increasingly Christ-like as thoughts of redemptive self-sacrifice take hold. The deus ex machina finale, and in which the goddess Diana is played by a child,hints ambivalently at a return to prelapsarian innocence.
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Source: theguardian.com