Opera Reviews
29 March 2024
Untitled Document

The evening belongs to Alex Otterburn's Eddy



by Catriona Graham
Turnage: Greek
Edinburgh International Festival
August 2017

In its 70th year, the Edinburgh International Festival kicks off the opera programme with Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 1986 opera Greek, co-produced by Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures.

The opera, to Steven Berkoff’s libretto relocates the Oedipus story to working-class London, where we are introduced to Eddy. This production opens with a white screen dominating the front of the stage, and pierced with black door-spaces close to the wings. In silence, Alex Otterburn explodes onto the stage through one of these openings and eyes up the audience, a slight smirk playing on his face. He is wearing a red Adidas tracksuit.

The remaining cast members – Susan Bullock, Allison Cook and Andrew Shore – multi-task as his family, pub/wine-bar regulars, Keystone Cop-ish riot police, the café staff of his new life, the sphinx; their acting and characterisation vivid and intense. Shore’s face ‘working’ as he winds himself up to tell Eddy the truth, first about the fortune teller then, much later, the big secret about his parentage, is memorable.

The screen is used to emphasise some words from the libretto – not full supertitles – and also to punctuate some scenes with ‘props’. As the ‘Greek’ chorus sings of the problems of the city and the difficulty of separating ‘the shit from the shinola’ live video shows present-day newspapers covered with baked beans and squirted with tomato and brown sauce; the sprinkling of live, squirming maggots draws tiny mewls of disgust from the audience. The screen also rotates to indicate changes of scene, the passage of time, and journeys.

Turnage’s music is punky, jazzy and in-yer-face. Highlights include ‘Smash. Crack. Splatter. Kerrack.’ where the orchestra is beating riot shields as the cops beat up Eddy (ripped off from Iggy Pop’s 1977 Lust for Life?), and the music-hall routine when the big secret about his parentage is revealed.  All the same, it is lyrical and tender in the passages between Eddy and his wife, notwithstanding Allison Cook’s matter-of-fact depiction of the drunken violence she had previously experienced as married life.

Director Joe Hill-Gibbons ensures this is a high-energy performance with movement director Jenny Ogilvie rarely allowing the cast to stand still.  And yet there are very effective moments of silence, spaces for the music and action to pause, and consider.

The costumes are a delight of tasteless horror – lots of shiny wet-look PVC in garish colours, with Dad’s sludge-coloured trousers regrettably unforgettable. Matthew Richardson’s lighting of Johannes Schutz’ set is stark and powerful – towards the end contrasting blood-red on one side and greenish-white on the other side of the rotating screen.  

Stuart Stratford, conducting soloists from the orchestra of Scottish Opera, keeps this all together with aplomb and considerable sangfroid, as the rotations miss his head by inches.

But the evening belongs to Eddy and to Alex Otterburn’s outstanding performance – an Emerging Artist who has, on this evidence, emerged.

Text © Catriona Graham
Photo © Jane Hobson
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