Colonel Gaddafi swears vengeance against the West in a fiery aria set in the bombed-out ruins of Tripoli. Colonel Gaddafi spars with President Reagan in a searing duet at the UN General Assembly. Colonel Gaddafi sings a power ballad about women’s lib while his female bodyguards fan out around him in Busby Berkeley fishnets and feather boas. Yes, it’s Gaddafi — the opera, and it isn’t coming to a stage near you.
But Gaddafi: A Living Myth, composed by the electronica collective Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), and commissioned by English National Opera, is finally arriving — and putting paid to the lingering suspicion that the work, first announced in July 2004, was as much of a “living myth” as the man who inspired it.
Back then, the short-lived regime of Sean Doran, the ENO boss, was in full flight, and ADF’s Gaddafi was a central plank in his manifesto. Alex Poots, then ENO’s new director of contemporary arts, promised a heady line-up for the new work: Peter Sellars, maverick opera director par excellence, would be the artistic adviser. The women of the ENO chorus were implausibly tipped to don the fatigues and high heels as Gaddafi’s bodyguards. As for the big man himself, JC001, the Irish-Indian MC, would rap his way through the part.
And now? “There was a lot of preparatory doodling about,” concedes Steve Chandra Savale of ADF (better known to some as Chandrasonic) — a fitting enough description of the various comings and goings since the initial hurrahs. First came the directors: the name of Sellars was swiftly swapped with that of Mike Figgis, who in turn made way for David Freeman, the Australian opera director.
Rap was replaced by spoken verse, in a new libretto drafted by Shan Khan, the Scottish playwright, and the actor Ramon Tikaram was brought in to replace JC001 as Gaddafi — joining a cast now entirely drawn from theatre rather than opera. Somewhere along the line the ENO chorus ladies bowed out of their bodyguard duties. In the post-Doran ENO, both Poots and his department have been quietly phased out.
But ENO has honoured its pledge to Savale, the main motor behind Gaddafi, and his intense enthusiasm is undimmed. “This is not an accurate portrayal of Gaddafi,” he says. “It’s all about the stories and counterstories about him. And the ideas of Gaddafi are fascinating — the uniqueness of his attempt to build a utopia, however you see it: as a brutal dictatorship or as a distinctly non-Western attempt at popular democracy.”
Yes, but is it opera? “Well, what’s an opera?” Savale fires back. “Opera just means ‘the works’: music, acting, narrative.”
Is he interested in opera? “Not really, no. But I’m very interested in the concept of opera — it’s just I find it quite annoying that it has to be associated with one particular sonic palette. In a way that has been the big struggle for this piece — trying to subvert the form, opera, musical, whatever you want to call it — to make a much darker political piece.”
And, presumably, something that hangs together as a drama in its own right? “Well, that’s very hard to do,” says Freeman, now in charge of binding the score — part electronica, part played by the ENO orchestra and North African musicians — together with Savale’s basic narrative. He admits that the original scenario was flawed: “The first version of the libretto I saw was short on drama and long on information.”
Khan, a no-nonsense Scotsman with an impressive track record of controversial, thought-provoking pieces about faith and multiculturalism, is even more direct. “Steve’s head is like a bingo machine with balls flying around in all directions. There was no story when I arrived, just hundreds of pages of notes that Steve had accumulated when he was just trying to fire out all the things he wanted to see. It had become an overwarm history lecture and obviously he didn’t want that. And it wasn’t making any sense to the powers that be at ENO.”
The basic tone of the piece also needed thrashing out. “When I was brought on board it was talked about whether we wanted to do something a little like The Producers,” says Khan. “But very quickly it became apparent to Steve and me that that wouldn’t work. Yes, to many people Gaddafi has become a comical figure, but he’s trying to portray himself as a model Arab statesman. It depends who writes his history.” More a musing on the story of Libya than a linear narrative, the scenario ultimately fashioned by Khan, Savale and Freeman focuses on the dictator and his inner circle rather than his conflict with Reagan, interweaved with events in the history of Libya from 1911 onwards. And has the Colonel been consulted? “He’s aware of it, and interested — but he hasn’t asked to see the text,” says ENO’s spokesperson, though the Libyan Embassy make “no comment”.
Certainly the Gaddafi swaggering through rehearsal at ENO’s West Hampstead studios is anything but a figure of ridicule, particularly when you add the nervy beat pounding out of ADF’s console acccompanying him. In a tense showdown with Jalloud, his right-hand man-turned-traitor, Tikaram’s portrayal of Gaddafi exudes a glamorous mystique. “Only in the desert is there true union between me and myself,” he warns Jalloud, in one of Khan’s typically meditative verses. On stage, Tikaram sizzles as much as his two bodyguards. “Watching the guy, it’s that size of personality, that ability to control, and that charisma,” says Tikaram. “He’s incredibly majestic. He carries himself very nobly and that’s very seductive.”
“He reinvents himself,” interjects Savale, “and that’s the rock’n’roll thing, isnt it? And that’s where the music comes in — it’s trying to capture the energy of change.”
Listen to Tikaram and Savale discuss Gaddafi and it’s pretty hard to locate much direct criticism of Gaddafi’s particular brand of “change” — a change that included violently crushing any dissent to his regime in his 37 years in charge. But everyone involved seems determined to create ambiguities rather than cast judgment. “Who perpetrated that image of Gaddafi as the mad dog of the Middle East?,” asks Khan fiercely. “It was Ronald Reagan and the US Administration. And to Gaddafi’s discredit he played up to that. They needed each other. They each helped keep their own countries in check, very much as Osama bin Laden is doing for George Bush now.”
Does Khan admire Gaddafi? “I certainly respect the fact that he’s not kowtowed to the West. I see him as a man who had a romantic idea of Arab unity and was naive enough to think that he could carry it off. At the same time he’s done some stupid things.” “The whole idea of good guy, bad guy is absolutely nonsensical,” adds Savale. “That’s why we have Ronald Reagan singing ‘we’re going to turn this world back to black and white’ and before that we have the scene where the CIA are talking, and they know damn well that the world isn’t black and white.”
But do Gaddafi’s politics actually add up to anything coherent? “To find a path that contains elements of women’s liberation, socialism and radical self-government on the basis of Islam is something that has a lot of promise,” insists Savale. “Now you’ve got all this ‘clash of civilisations’ rubbish, and here is an example of a completely different spin on the whole thing.”
Has ENO’s genre-busting, headline-grabbing commission become over-ambitious in its long gestation? “Of course, but anything genuinely interesting tends to be,” says Freeman. “This is a big, bold topic, which is of serious significance in our world today, and contemporary pop music is playing a huge role in the telling of the tale. If people want classical singing there isn’t any. We tried to put more singing into it and it didn’t work. It just doesn’t seem to be where this music and this particular story are going. But if ENO doesn’t experiment, then who does?”
Gaddafi opens on September 7 at the Coliseum, WC2 (0870 1450200)
