Among the barbarians

Just back from the latest opera from Philip Glass, Waiting for the Barbarians, based on J.M. Coetzee's novel, libretto by Christopher Hampton. A striking, troubling piece of work.

The story goes something like this: an administrator of a frontier town watches with increasing horror while agents of the state, sent from the capital, torture and kill in the name of the truth and in the service of defending country and empire against a feared barbarian advance. The administrator, a man who enjoys his pleasures as well as his peace, develops an ambiguous, perhaps redeeming affair with one of the captured and tortured barbarians.

He endures a difficult journey with the barbarian to deliver her back to her people, for which he is branded a traitor, imprisoned and tortured like the barbarians before him. Before he is apprehended, though, while he is still journeying with the woman, his lover now, it is conceivable that she might yet return with him, live with him in his frontier town. But the treatment she has received makes that impossible, despite the hope of the administrator.

Back in the town, the citizens, first pliant in the name of state security, then complicit in the name of empire, turn against the administrator, returned from his journey a convict. But when the army fails in their attack on the barbarians, when the aggression brings only more hardship and not less, the town turns back to the administrator, finally, and away from the ongoing, debased warmongering of the state. The townspeople throw away the shades given them by the state – yes, sunglasses, which from the start of the performance mark the choice to observe a different truth, dark and distorted.

Now's an appropriate time to say that there is nothing subtle about the drama in this opera. It is entirely a product of its times, and that is what makes it effective, particularly disturbing. Philip Glass, I should mention, writes of "a bold allegorical approach," and states that "[t]o reduce the opera to a single historical circumstance or a particular political regime misses the point." While I agree there's some heavy allegory here, I insist on missing the point. I saw precious little in the way of narrative arc or character development or dramatic tension or drive: just some very bad people, a witness, a mob and some other, innocent people. Six years ago this would not have offered much. I hope that in fifty years it offers nothing more. But this opera is very powerful now, and precisely because such obvious, unsubtle horror is happening so obviously and unsubtly in the world.

The voice in my head is saying I'm the one that's guilty of oversimplifying. But what I'm saying is narrowly intended: I'm not referring to a drama that's considering the fog of war, the quest for beauty, the burden of empire, the will to power. Philip Glass writes that his opera concerns "confrontation, crisis and redemption." The confrontation and crisis are of the clearest sort, so over-the-top it's absurd: it's Waiting for Godot turned into an address from the War President. That we must recognize this for precisely what it purports to be is shattering.

I left the theater feeling that the greatest hope this opera offers, in the clarity of its absurdity, is that it will in time be reduced to a historical footnote for its simplicity. My companion, however, was not so optimistic. I don't believe Mr. Glass is, either. The characters, for instance, spend as much time lying on the ground as standing, as though they just don't have the strength to make it through an entire scene upright. All of them, every character, except the two highest ranking, most rotten state agents, who stand through nearly every scene they're in. Our protagonist, the administrator who fights for rightness and redemption, he ends the opera on a low note – literally: his last note is perhaps his lowest of the night – and he's lying down again, forced down as the ceiling of the sky descends on him, slowly.

And he is confused, the administrator, at the end of the play. In his confusion, the drama achieves its most complex insight. It's as damning as all the rest. The administrator still recognizes something good in his city, but knows the worst now. Yet having witnessed and been subjected to the worst, he cannot understand it. It stares him in the face, he says, but he can't see it. Not seeing, what can he do? He can go on, follow a road that might lead nowhere, he says, as he's forced to his belly again.

Something is terribly wrong. It's clear and horrible, it's all around and everyone's part of it. That's the confrontation and crisis. Redemption? Perhaps, but first the administrator has to understand the nature of what's gone wrong, why and how, then get a better idea where he might be headed.

At last I can mention the music and sets. Because in acknowledging open questions I've finally got around to admitting depth to this opera, and with depth, artistry. The orchestral and choir work is rich and haunting, and there are dream sequences that are all orchestra and choir. Classic Glass, all shifting rhythms and lowly changing textures, with drive and beauty as well as tension. And the set is a stunning thing of flowing screens and changing lights.

With the dreams, their music and the luminous world, we have something more, something that the corrupted world of state and burgher cannot entirely efface. Something that promises redemption after all, if we're strong enough to endure what we're part of, overcome what we've created, understand, perhaps, what we might be.