FIRST NIGHT

Opera review: Satyagraha at the London Coliseum

The images and icons that the Improbable team create with the simplest materials are astonishing even on a fourth viewing
Toby Spence’s Gandhi is a riveting amalgam of granite and gentleness
Toby Spence’s Gandhi is a riveting amalgam of granite and gentleness
DONALD COOPER

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★★★☆☆
So highly does English National Opera rate the pulling power of Philip Glass’s “Gandhi” opera that it has revived Phelim McDermott’s 2007 production three times in 11 years. Let’s hope ENO’s punters are as patient as Gandhi himself. Having seen the piece four times, I can report that those three and a half hours of Sanskrit, sung without surtitles to Glass’s eternally looping chord sequences, don’t go any quicker if you know what’s coming.

Knowing what’s coming, however, is pretty essential. If newcomers to Satyagraha can’t immediately recall the chronology of civil-rights demonstrations by the Indian community in South Africa between 1896 and 1913 (not to mention the place of Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore and Martin Luther King in the history of nonviolent protest),