"Oedipus Rex" is a take on the Sophocles myth and is performed by the Canadian Opera Company in the Edinburgh International Festival.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 30 August 2002

KIRSTY WARK:
Paul Morley, were you glued to your seat?

PAUL MORLEY:
It was a hell of a party and a great privilege to be there. It's a great piece of 20th century theatre and very rarely performed.

It takes close to 300 people to set it up. I have all their names if you would like to hear them! It's a great assimilation of everything Stravinsky tried before in the music and a hint of the music he was going into that leads up to the Rake's Progress.

There is a great combination of Verdi and Mozart and medieval chant, but what's fantastic as well, from the point of view of not really being an opera expert, it has everything you would want from opera.

It's got the fat lady, men singing deeply, a great combination of epic intimacy and of sublime nonsense and brilliance. It's also over in less than an hour, which is a help.

KIRSTY WARK:
Amazing hand signals which were part of the original.

PAUL MORLEY:
It's fantastic because it's got the Cocteau element. Stravinsky did it in Latin to get away with superfluous expression, any kind of vulgarity.

He wanted the sound rather than the meaning. Cocteau did it in French, it was turned into Latin. Cocteau created a narrator that anticipates some of the events. We still had the surtitles.

KIRSTY WARK:
It's in Latin. Presumably Stravinsky didn't think anybody was going to understand Latin, then. He had the narrator, which is fine. Now we have the technology of not the subtitles but the surtitles. It seems to be information overload. It was too literal?

DENISE MINA:
It is absolutely magnificent to watch, but it's such a busy stage. Stravinsky wanted nobody to move during it. He wanted the actors to be static so that it didn't distract from the music. That's why it was in Latin.

The narrator was Cocteau's idea. He wanted everything to be static about it. It is magnificent. You can tell the director worked in video before this. It is beautifully composed.

Everything is a perfect shot, but it's so busy. At one point, all the ladies get up, I think you saw on the film, they get up and they are moving about topless. It's incredibly distracting! You are not listening to the music at all.

KIRSTY WARK:
It looked like William Blake, all the writhing bodies moving up.

ADAM MARS-JONES:
It looked like Bosch, some expressionist, some baroque. If this was his first stage work, let alone a musical stage, it's an astounding debut in any art form.

It's not busy to me. The interest is kept seething the whole time. There is never distraction. The fact that much of it is done with bodies that we only see the arms of - and I do giggle a lot in opera.

There is a moment when Creon put up a sword and all the bodies did the same, and I thought, "Oh, God, it's going to turn into Simon Says." But it sustained the mood.

I thought the women there were to give us an idea that there has been a life of tenderness together.

The Polish contralto can do everything but express the beauty of young love, because she is one of those power house contralto, with the voice and the tent dress, and they can't do the other bit. We needed something visually to represent that.

KIRSTY WARK:
What did you think about the hook first brought out when they staged this in 1997, of being an anthem to the AIDS generation, and the idea that the plague of thieves which was visited by the gods had some similarity.

ADAM MARS-JONES:
I have a problem with that.

PAUL MORLEY:
I prefer to avoid that. The opening piece dealing with that I felt was a beautiful piece of music, beautifully done. At first, I thought the people being written on were the names of the people in the cast.

ADAM MARS-JONES:
Sur-credits.

PAUL MORLEY:
That kind of thing I didn't really want to pay attention to. Stravinsky was going back to ancient Greece to recreate an order after the chaos of the world war. He was going for order. I would be interested to see what Stravinsky felt that he was getting.

ADAM MARS-JONES:
There was an astounding moment which I completely went with. There was total silence and freeze for almost 30 seconds. I didn't panic and think it had all gone wrong.

I thought they had found a hinge in the work and they are letting me take it in. The fact that is a flub and you found a conductor prompting somebody in Latin, what a joy, thank you Edinburgh.

PAUL MORLEY:
You realised then what an incredible performance it was, that it maintained all these people, the orchestra, the whole thing.

For a moment, you just forget that because it's so seamless, to be reminded that this is an incredible feat. It was almost you felt it was meant.