**** (4 stars)
“A Brilliant Concept!”
I don’t know quite what I was expecting with this collaboration between Scottish Opera and KAJIMOTO, but what I found was much food for thought and some exquisite moments fusing art and music.
The Japanese artist Hokusai is probably best known to most Brits as the man who painted ‘that famous picture of the enormous blue wave towering over a tiny mountain’. Composer Dai Fujikura and multi-disciplinary artist, writer and producer Harry Ross, with the assistance of a team of very talented creatives, offered us a series of scenes from the life of the artist.
We began in silence: mourners bring single lilies to lay on what one assumes is a coffin – though like so many things in this opera, the shape and purpose of the central object is not immediately clear to a western eye. Hokusai is dead, but his spirit watches over his daughter Ōi as she remembers coming to live and work with her father. A shivering Chinese flute provides an unearthly accompaniment.
Hokusai is struck by lightning. While unconscious, he has a vision of being in a small fishing boat from which he can see a distant view of Mount Fuji. A giant wave nearly overwhelms the boat. He becomes consumed with the need to survive, and to paint the Great Wave.
We go back and forwards in time: scenes from the funeral; public art-making by the painter; his financial struggles and the acquisition of a pot of Prussian Blue pigment [‘more valuable than gold’]; the ageing artist sharing health-giving tea with his daughter; his move to Obuse and interaction with the people there: and a final dream-like scene in which the painter’s spirit commingles with and disappears into the mythical Tiger and Dragon.
Throughout the opera, the constant refrain is “give me ten more years” – Hokusai the artist never sits still, confident that he had ‘got it right’: he is always looking to refine his art so that every line, every dot expresses the essence of what he is trying to portray.
I guess my first reaction was “Quite what is an opera?” The Great Wave is not filled with jealousy, rage, despair, unrequited, thwarted or forbidden love, dynastic tangles, sibling rivalry, mistaken identities, or tragic deaths: so is it opera? Certainly there are words and there is music, but any emotions are restrained almost to the point of non-existence. Blessedly the dialogue is in English, and there are supertitles to help when the pitch of the notes or the timbre of the voice make comprehension difficult.
The music took some getting used to – not because it was not pleasant to listen to, but because it was all completely new, with few ‘comfort zones’ in which to rest for a while. There was some gorgeously evocative Chinese flute playing – fascinating to see the instrument itself when its player took his bow at the final curtain. There was a gloriously bubbling accompaniment to the drinking of the health-giving tea offered by daughter to father, and some terrifying moments during the dream-storm during which Hokusai experienced the Great Wave.
The music certainly doesn’t fit into a standard operatic pattern of conversation [recitative] to advance the action and song [arias and ensembles] in which the singer or singers reveal their feelings. In telling a friend about the challenges of making sense of it, especially on a first hearing, I was reminded of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, which similarly consists of a number of scenes [which I described to her as inscrutable] from which one tries to work out quite what is happening and what is each character’s motivation, with little help from the music. There were very few moments in The Great Wave when more than one voice joined in harmony – and those few were most welcome. As with other modern works, I feel I would benefit hugely from hearing it more than once, whereupon it might begin to make a lot more sense.
Visually the piece was very impressive. Initially, a huge whiteish cylinder dominated the stage – until it separated into three sections which, when rotated, revealed a gigantic representation of the Hokusai painting so familiar to us all. Most of the costumes were creamy-white, so when in the second half Hokusai and Ōi’s costumes were infused with some of the Prussian Blue, it was a striking [and welcome] contrast. There wasn’t much other moveable scenery – though at times there was a large group of stagehands getting props on and off stage: good that they got their own applause at the final curtain.
Applause, too, for the puppeteers, whose sinuous weaving of Tiger and Dragon throughout the final scenes contributed hugely to the spectacle. My companion summed it up nicely when he suggested that Hokusai was dissolving into and becoming one with the world of Tiger and Dragon – a brilliant concept which is difficult to portray on a Glasgow stage: it could be done so superbly with film effects…
Running through the whole piece was a meditation on what is life about? what is being an artist about? As I’ve said, “Give me another ten years and I will be a better artist” was Hokusai’s constant refrain. At times we got many of his pictures, projected on to the segments of the cylinder. Unfortunately for those on the edges of the auditorium, the projections were not always particularly easy to see clearly. The Great Wave itself, though, was utterly fabulous, on a mammoth scale commensurate with the wave from the artist’s dream.
There was also the challenge of understanding something from an unfamiliar culture. The representations of ‘Japanese culture’ that we receive mostly from western artists and western ideas of what ‘Japanese’ is [think Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, or Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado] all very good, but rarely if ever representations of the real Japan.
My recent obsession with K-drama on Netflix was an eye-opening introduction into a completely different cultural world where gestures, facial expressions, behaviour, and the niceties of language all mean something which I am only slowly learning to understand. The recent film Rental Families was another instance of how hard it can be for westerners to understand oriental culture. How easy to judge by western standards rather than try to grasp the reality… It was very helpful to read the synopsis of the action before the show began: I would have found it equally helpful to have an introduction to the basics of Japanese culture and manners, costume and behaviour!
Cast and creatives, too many to mention individually, have worked together to create a novel and challenging work. Huge credit to everyone involved in The Great Wave – yet another amazing Scottish Opera first!
Scottish Opera presents The Great Wave, Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Run Ended. The production will play the Festival Theatre Edinburgh on Thursday 19th and Saturday 21st February for more information and tickets go to: https://www.capitaltheatres.com/shows/the-great-wave/
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