★★☆☆☆
After important Ancient Egyptians died, their organs were painstakingly removed. The brain needed special attention: it was liquefied, then dragged out through the nose with a special hook. The question I started pondering during English National Opera’s Akhnaten was whether the liquefying bit would actually be necessary if I keeled over halfway through, or whether Philip Glass had already done that bit for me.
Glass’s 1984 opera about the mysterious 18th-dynasty pharaoh who worshipped a single god had its British premiere a year later at ENO. The company now revisits this cult piece with the same team, Phelim McDermott and the Improbable theatre company, who produced its sensational Satyagraha, yet Akhnaten is a much trickier challenge. To his usual minimalist devices Glass added bombastic brass, scrunchier chords and thumping percussion. There are some startling contrasts (high sopranos over rasping tuba — fabulous) and a haunting duet for the pharaoh (a countertenor) and his wife, Nefertiti (mezzo). Yet in trading the meditative gleam of Satyagraha for blare and bling, the music paradoxically sounds more sterile, more mindless.
McDermott struggles to find the right visual tone to match. Eye-popping, time-hopping costumes by Kevin Pollard range from Egyptian masks through Mad Max pelts to Elizabethan frocks — or nothing at all, in the case of Anthony Roth Costanzo’s first appearance as Akhnaten, starkers and entirely hairless (yep, both upper and lower Egypt) like a freshly hatched alien.
Some of the stage pictures are beautiful, particularly when Bruno Poet’s lighting bathes a giant sun (designs by Tom Pye) in crimson-red and livid-blue. Yet what narrative there is — Akhnaten is crowned, bans other gods, incites rebellion, dies — evaporates thanks to McDermott’s major balls up: literally. This is a troupe of jugglers in unitards (the Skills ensemble, last seen romping through McDermott’s ENO Così) who are used to signify . . . well, nothing and everything. Sometimes the balls are bigger and sometimes they are swapped for clubs. Sometimes the stentorian chorus play along, throwing their own balls in the air, looking unconvinced and uncoordinated. Now that they have reportedly suspended their plans to strike, they have to go through with this circus show six more times.
The singers bear this stoically. Costanzo’s Akhnaten, when not straining to be heard above the orchestra (not always perfectly synchronised under Karen Kamensek’s baton) has the right otherworldly gleam to his voice. Emma Carrington, new to ENO, impresses as Nefertiti, while Clive Bayley is one of the more noticeable heavies singing angry words in Coptic. Glass fanatics will flock to Akhnaten. Agnostics should make up their own mind — but bring along a nose hook.
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