Without wishing to be culturally insensitive, this extravaganza about Genghis Khan’s predecessors is hilariously awful. It’s performed in Mongolian with English surtitles, and purports to offer an elevated, tourism-baiting introduction to Mongolian culture and history. Instead, it tells a short, thin tale of stupidity and cruelty at interminable length.
The lead actors mostly strike attitudes at the forestage and declaim their lines. Behind and around them, 60-plus dancers and acrobalancers, in traditional costumes or hideously flayed and bloodied bodysuits, vibe to the mood.
They tweely cavort and flick-flack in rare moments of joy, quiver as if electrocuted when rage is in the air, and in the bits in between, jump around or pulse like jellyfish. As the empty spectacle grinds on you, become convinced there’s no equivalent phrase in Mongolian to “get a bleeding move on”. Is this really what English National Opera is meant to leave the Coliseum for?
The show is set 2,000 years ago in the nomadic Hunna Empire, about which little is known, but around which the late Mongolian writer Lkhagvasuren Bavuu crafted the three-act tragedy on which The Mongol Khan is based.
Queen Tsetser and Queen Consort Gerel almost simultaneously bear sons to ruler Archug Khan, even though he protests that “for 20 years I’ve not spilled my seed inside” Tsetser. We have award-winning playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker to thank for this and other gems of translation.
Archug’s chancellor Egereg convinces him the child is legitimate, although it’s he who impregnated Tsetser. The Khan, still uneasy – mind like a steel trap, he’s got – anoints Gerel’s son as his successor. Whereupon Egereg hauls the lascivious Tsetser to him on an umbilical rope between his legs and, by aggressively groping then beating her, persuades her to swap the babies.
This takes up all of the first half. In the second, the legacy of bad blood plays laboriously out, and the women and their children are casually sacrificed. There’s no sense of any wider society behind the ruling family’s dimwitted psychodrama in Hero Baatar’s production, no emotional conviction to the action.
I haven’t named individual actors because they all strike the same, po-faced note throughout. The music has a turgid, martial swell and the voices sound processed: some into sing-song banality, others into a guttural, throaty snarl.
The choreography is well drilled and impressive in scale but feels like it’s been fed through a cultural food processor to make it palatable to audiences used to Cirque du Soleil.
The set largely consists of back projections: a sword piercing a smoking circlet, a moon laced by electrical storms. The costumes, though, are great, a mad melting pot mish-mash of coats, robes, masks, crowns, head-dresses, batwings, peacock fans and glitter-strewing elongated sleeves.
I was sad the two costumed horseback archers patrolling St Martin’s Lane on opening night didn’t make an appearance onstage. I was also slightly sad they didn’t shoot me before I went in.
