Myths provide an immediate link for an audience. They tap into a shared psychology. Maybe these days myths aren’t as available to us at school as they used to be, but they appear in other forms: superhero films, action heroes and video games.
When Wagner or the Grimm brothers reinvented German myths they had a hell of a job: a lot had already been forgotten or neglected by the 19th century. Every age has to revitalise its myths. They also change drastically, absorbing the prejudices — or liberality — of the times in which they are told. Between the first and second edition, the Grimms Disneyfied the tales, so a mother and father being abusive to their children became a wicked stepmother. But their tales were also full of 19th-century antisemitism, fed into the stories.
Now I’m directing Rossi’s rarely performed opera Orpheus. It’s the most extreme and sometimes nutty telling of the story that you could imagine, but it still packs a punch. That displays the power of myths. One event can be seen from many aspects, and it’s the variation in the telling that is the essential part of the myth.
Grimms’ Fairytales
It’s the endless retelling that is inspirational. Sondheim’s 1986 Into the Woods is maybe the most brilliant and complete amalgamation. Then there are those wonderful poems of Ann Sexton, playing out her own autobiography of sexual abuse and New York life in the Sixties through the tales. The stories themselves are so fanciful and fun and weird — they seem to endlessly repay visiting.
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Orpheus
Rossi’s version of the story is almost a boulevard comedy for two acts, then Eurydice is bitten by a snake and it becomes a very moving portrayal of Orpheus’s descent into hell. It’s a very modern predicament — the Hades which we visit is “within” ourselves: it’s jealousy and longing and wanting.
Faust
I can’t think of a piece after Faust that has that duality of myth and modernity. I’m in the process of doing a cycle of four operas inspired by the story — by Gounod, Berlioz, Busoni and Schnittke — and in each the myth debates not only the psychological but the social issues of a moral world: warfare, science, our attitude to women. And signing a pact with the devil is something we can all understand.
Tristan and Isolde
Tristan appeared at Arthur’s Round Table but then the medieval poet Gottfried von Strassburg turned the story into this huge analysis of love in which adulterous love became something to applaud. That was long before Wagner turned the story into a sensual, almost sick world of passions.
Jesus Christ
The power of a myth is its symbolic truth. But a lot of Judaeo-Christian tradition has been to say that you have to believe in the literal truth of somebody who died and was born again. That’s ruining the power of a myth — and this myth is one of the most beautiful and powerful of them all.
Antigone
The whole history of western culture is contained between the absolute opposite ways of telling this story in the versions by Sophocles (c 441 BC) and Anouilh (1944). In Sophocles the whole debate is about Antigone’s social responsibility; it’s far from sympathetic to her. By the time you get to Anouilh he is referencing the French Resistance and the play totally supports her point of view against the state. We go from collective consciousness to an age where we value individual freedom more than anything.
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Orpheus is at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London SE1 (020 7401 9919) , from October 23