During a conversation three years ago, Alex Poots, then director of contemporary arts at English National Opera (ENO), made a snap decision. Talking to Steve Savale, of the British electro-rap band Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), he realised he had stumbled onto something. “Steve had been a political-science student,” recalls Poots, “and he said, ‘I’ve been researching Gadaffi for eight years.’ We looked at each other and I said, ‘That’s my first opera commission.’”
That was then, this is now. Poots has moved on to the new Manchester International Festival, but his commission has survived. And in 11 days’ time, Savale’s collaboration with the playwright Shan Khan, subtitled A Living Myth, arrives on the stage of the London Coliseum.
Now you might think that the commissioning process for one of our national opera companies would be lengthier than that. But Poots is famously, and bracingly, impulsive. And, if ENO’s decision to schedule just six performances suggests trepidation as well as pragmatism, it’s also worth remembering that the forthcoming season was cobbled together in a rush after months of crisis. In this context, isn’t an opera about a deeply controversial North African dictator, scored by someone who is a complete stranger to the conventions and idioms of operatic composition, an even riskier proposition — especially when it opens the new season? At ENO’s west London rehearsal space, the company wears the collective expression — a mixture of mania, sleep deprivation, grim determination and the shortest of fuses — common to those in the arts as they near an opening night. On what serves as a stage, a large cast plays, variously: Islamic fundamentalists, Bedouin, Gadaffi’s children, his infamous female bodyguards, Tony Blair and sundry other characters. Watching them, and scribbling notes frantically, are the director, David Freeman, and his assistants. And behind them, tinkering at a laptop and looking as if he’s about to keel over from exhaustion, stands Savale, hopping from one foot to the other.
The actor Ramon Tikaram — best known for his portrayal of the gay motorbike courier Ferdy in the BBC2 series This Life — plays the colonel himself. The scenes I catch cover the bombing of Tripoli (and the resulting death of Gadaffi’s daughter), the Lockerbie tragedy and the subsequent trial and conviction of a Libyan man, and our own dear leader’s visit to Gadaffi in a tent in the desert. If the heart leaps (and optimism soars) when Savale’s score deploys furious drum’n’bass music during the Tripoli bombing, it sinks when Tikaram walks to the front of the stage and sing-speaks the ominously chatty and prosaic line: “I’m still a simple Bedouin, no matter what they say.”
Before they break for tea, the cast are given notes by the director. “I really think it’s too long, Steve,” he says to Savale about an inter-scene instrumental section. Shortly afterwards, the composer rushes from the hall and sits, slumped with exhaustion, in the canteen. “I’m in a right state, actually,” he says. “I think I’ve become self-aware a bit late on about certain things. There’s all this stuff going on around you, then you start to realise that there is a kind of system here, and you’re trapped in it.” His eyes are barely open, and he admits he’s getting little sleep. “I’m not going to come in here,” he continues, “and say I’m totally gung-ho about it. I don’t like the false positivity that, in our era, everyone’s supposed to have: the ‘power of positive thinking’.”
Someone more experienced in the mysterious ways of theatre and opera would have realised that, without positive thinking, not to mention compromise, the whole system would collapse. But Savale is new to all of this. Poots recalls him saying: “I never thought a national stage would be available to us.” Now that it is, the agitating side of him is spoiling for a fight, artistically at least. But he will also mutter darkly about finding himself “deferring in areas such as casting, choreography, many other things: it has been a struggle to keep the vision on track” — and you may remember that an Irish-Asian poet known as JC-001 was originally slated for the role Tikaram is now playing.
It’s important to point out that the ADF man also enthuses about receiving and developing the commission. The ENO orchestra will share duties with rappers, an Egyptian music collective, recorded news commentary, spoken polemic, highly physical choreography and video footage. (ADF have already written retrospective scores for the films La Haine and The Battle of Algiers, so Savale is experienced in this area.) Everything is being thrown into the musical pot, as you’d expect from a musician who has produced such thrilling albums as Rafi’s Revenge and Community Music.
“I still believe,” he says, “that there are music forms that haven’t been explored to their full potential, in terms of the musical, the opera.” Moreover, he had been writing longer works for years before Poots came calling, and was tiring of the restrictive nature of the pop business. “I wanted to get away from all those assumptions, and the format of a radio-friendly track with a chorus. Or a club track: ‘Right, the beat’s got to kick in here, the bass there.’” But he admits that the leap from three-minute singles to a 130-minute piece for the stage is a daunting one. “I’ve just kind of gone with it,” he laughs, “because it’s such a ridiculous idea.”
Savale is also relishing the prospect of a scrap with opera-goers for whom his work will, artistically, be anathema; and those who will use the subject matter, and its publicly subsidised commissioning, as another stick to beat ENO with. “I’m happy to cause a furore among people like that,” he says. “What’s the point of preaching to the converted?” In any case, he argues, the piece is as much about the space between the West’s demonisation of Gadaffi and his own self-mythologising (and the historical pattern these are a part of) as it is about the leader himself. It runs from Gadaffi’s coup in 1969 to the Blair rapprochement in 2004, and its aims, Savale says, are clear. “The point is, if that (the new opera) is your prism, what do you actually learn? Do we learn about the deconstruction of an image of a leader? Does it deconstruct the image? Have you, the audience, just seen a cool show, or a controversial one, or an offensive one?” That strikes me as a lot of questions this late in the day, but presumably Savale, Khan and Freeman arrive at some answers, too. If they don’t, you can bet their critics will.
As Savale leaves to get some sleep, the affable Tikaram sits in his place. First things first: is he taking part in the mooted one-off reunion episode of This Life? No, he says, for reasons that it would spoil fans’ enjoyment of the show to reveal. How can he be so certain? “They haven’t given me a filming date,” he says. “I think that’s the giveaway.” As for Gadaffi, Tikaram confirms that the opera won’t be referring to his apparently chronic flatulence, induced by his penchant for eating dates, and documented by the journalist John Simpson in his autobiography. “There is a scatological side to David (Freeman),” says Tikaram, “and he mentioned that in one of our first meetings — but only as a thing to identify about Gadaffi. And, as I said to him, I can’t fart on cue.”
Nor will Tikaram — who was a choirboy as a child — be singing in the opera. “The thing is,” he explains, “to ground Gadaffi in a dark place and not remove him from there. So you won’t have him singing and dancing.” A small part of me regrets this. If Tikaram feels the same, he isn’t saying.What he does say is that, in researching the colonel and studying footage, he has discovered all sorts of habits and tics: “He sits there like a camel and looks from side to side. But maybe all creatures of the desert behave like that. And even in the early footage, where he’s part of a team, he has this charisma. His walk isn’t quite effeminate, but it’s certainly stagey. It’s that type of thing I’ve been looking for.”
In costume, Tikaram is getting near Gadaffi. The problem is, the Libyan leader is rubbing off on him, too. “My children have suddenly discovered there’s a new person on the sofa. Sitting on trains, too, you can look really arrogant and weird. I noticed someone looking at me recently, as if to say, ‘You’re that actor bloke, but you’re kind of different.’ So I resumed Ramon.” Back in rehearsal, he resumes Gadaffi. “When God comes to make his judgment,” he sneers at Blair, “who’ll be first in line, now that your torture chambers outnumber mine?” Three years on, Poots’s snap decision is shaping up nicely for an explosive opening night.
Performances begin at the London Coliseum, WC2, on September 7
