L’Orfeo

review

–

Kentridge’s

exhilarating

creativity

animates

compelling

Monteverdi

There is a lot to look at in Glyndebourne’s first production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Directed by William Kentridge with a set by Sabine Theunissen, this staging is rooted in an artist’s studio and borne along by objects and images. Some are three-dimensional, real-life: ladders, chairs, sketchbooks, a mid-century desk lamp. Some are cartoonishly 2D or purely symbolic (placards shaped like oak-leaves, concertinas of coloured cardboard, big sheets of paper printed with Kentridge’s own work, an oversized metal cone used as a loudhailer). And many are projected on to the back wall of the stage in a video (designed by Janus Fouché) that starts before the first note of Monteverdi’s score and runs throughout as a constant, often hyperactive spool of Kentridge’s animated charcoal drawings, annotated archive documents and fragmentary phrases.