Every culture, in its oldest stories, sends someone into the dark for love. The Greeks had Orpheus, who descended through Tartarus armed with nothing but a lyre. The Egyptians had Isis, gathering up the scattered pieces of her murdered Osiris. The Sanskrit tradition gave us Savitri, who followed the god of death himself -- Yama -- step by relentless step, until her devotion wore him down. Cultures that never traded a word with one another somehow reached the same dream: that grief is strong enough to open a door the dead have closed behind them.
That shared human hunger is where Opera Siam's new production of Orfeo Ed Euridice begins too -- and then it takes you somewhere you have never been before. The underworld their Orfeo enters is not a shadowy Greek cavern but the hell realms of Thai Buddhist cosmology. Those realms, as it happens, are also presided over by Yama -- the very god Savitri once refused to leave without her husband. The dream really is shared.
What astonishes a visitor about the Thai hell realms is their specificity. They are blazing, vivid, almost hallucinatory -- the demons have names, the torments are exquisitely catalogued, and the murals on a thousand temple walls have been teaching the living what waits for them since the Ayutthaya kingdom. Over this landscape -- particular, unmistakably Thai -- Gluck pours his great 18th century score, music so pure in its grief it sounds like it was written for exactly this crossing.
