Philip Glass’s decade-old chamber opera adaptation of Kafka’s short story finally tours the UK in director Michael McCarthy’s grimy, pared-down production. It tells the story of an Officer (Omar Ebrahim, baritone) who is the last proponent of a brutal execution device that inscribes in script the crimes of those it executes. A Visitor (Michael Bennett, tenor) to the colony looks on and reflects ruefully on the barbaric practice, while a silent, unnamed condemned man (Gerald Tyler) awaits his punishment.
While Glass’s self-described “repetitive structures” enhance the impending sense of doom and disaster, McCarthy goes the less-is-more route, leaving the machine itself to form in the imagination of the audience, prodded along by a bleakly evocative soundscape, and using strong stage composition to tell much of the story. Tyler is uncomfortably moving as the condemned, looking upon the proceedings with a simple, childlike curiosity; Ebrahim attacks his sadistic/masochistic role with relish, while Bennett brings a strong sense of scruples compromised by cultural barriers; he is appalled by the barbaric behaviour, yet as an outsider tries not to judge; its something Brits can relate to, as we read in the newspapers of, say, Iran’s appalling misogynistic violence, knowing that our leaders may soon use this to commit atrocities against the country that are equally barbaric, and that our own national forms of misogyny are merely more subdued (see page 3 of the Sun for more details). Indeed, this notion of a double standard is prevalent throughout the piece, climaxing in a switcheroo that sees the executioner seize the machine for himself, underscoring the essential masochism inherent in those proponents of torture and capital punishment; our compassion, it has been noted, is essential even towards those who act without it, since it’s what separates the two.