This operatic production leans into several grand traditions: ancient Greek drama, Korean pansori (in which a singer is accompanied by percussion), blues and jazz. It adds occasional pop-concert optics and the effect, which might easily have been a hodgepodge, is scintillating from start to finish.
Director Ong Keng Sen transposes Euripides’ tragedy so artfully that the production is an exemplar of how any culture can own the ancient Greek myths.
There is a high-octane look and sound to this surtitled production by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea which explores the fall of Troy from the point of view of its women with utmost delicacy. It draws out a spectrum of emotions and the power dynamics between these widows and daughters, whose identity shifts beneath their feet in the aftermath of war, from queens and noblewomen to slaves, concubines, war trophies and lambs to the slaughter.
Musical director and composer Jung Jae-il, a K-pop producer who wrote the score for the Oscar-winning film Parasite, and pansori master Ahn Sook-sun have created a bold combination of modern and ancient sounds, from a cappella vocals to soaring ballads with contemporary beats.
Pansori singing, with its guttural quality, is perfectly matched to the lamentation in the story: some notes sounds like elongated wails, screams and shouts. Written by Bae Sam-sik, whose book is poetic but also visceral and stark, these are not women entirely reduced by fear or mourning. The eight-strong female chorus conveys their inner strength and their emotional responses switch from horror to resilience and pragmatism.
Cassandra (Yi So-yeon), so often shown as a dishevelled victim, displays a calm air of vengeance before being led away to become Agamemnon’s concubine. Hecuba (Kim Kum-mi) is by turns horrified and enraged by the suffering that women endure at the hands of men’s warring.
Maternal love and loss is further represented by Andromache (Kim Mi-jin) in the terrible command for her to hand over her baby to be slaughtered. “Just one moment,” she says, and speaks to Astyanax with painful tenderness. Helen, the outsider, is played by male performer, Kim Jun-soo, a brave piece of casting that pays off. She is the outsider, despised by all, yet Jun-soo who exudes her natural allure.
Cho Myung-hee’s monochrome white set has ascending stairs, as if these women are already in an afterlife. Bursts of light and tsunamis of colour convey the danger that surrounds them (lighting by Scott Zielinski and video design by Austin Switser) in a production that is ravishing in its spectacle, epic in its drama and truly tragic.
At Festival theatre, Edinburgh, until 11 August
