from Medieval Academy News

Beyond Beowulf: Los Angeles Opera Brings Grendel to the Stage
by Lisi Oliver

The gestation period of an elephant is twenty-two months; that of a Heaneywulf seems to be closer to five years. For surely it is at least in part to the meteoric rise of Heaney's translation/interpretation of Beowulf to the bestseller lists in 2000 that we owe this season's abundance of theatrical adaptations. Three films are either in the course of production or on the quest for American distribution. The Irish Repertory Theatre in New York produced Beowulf in a version that draws on musical genres ranging from medieval to modern. The Triad Theatre in North Carolina's Brother Wolf provided almost an exact counterpart. Both strip the poem of its period elements and the action, but the moralizing and philosophy still carry a profound message.

The production that attracted most media attention was the Los Angeles Opera premiere of Grendel, inspired, not by the Anglo-Saxon poem, but by John Gardner's novel reinterpreting the beginning events of the poem as seen through the eyes of the monster. Personally, I've always found Gardner's novel tedious. Grendel seems to me not the most interesting choice for a post-colonial protagonist. He attacks; he attacks again; he has his arm torn from the shoulder and finally his head cut off. It is a linear progression towards failure. More intriguing might be to build an opera around Unferth; at least there is some character development in the moment he offers Beowulf his sword to combat the monsters he knows he cannot face himself. But it is Gardner's novel that has been operaticized by the team of Eliot Rosenthal (score), Julie Taymor (production and libretto), and J. D. McClatchy (libretto). They have given it the subtitle Transcendence of the Great Big Bad.

Two things generated the initial media hype. First was the production team, who came to this assignment with an impressive slew of credentials: Taymor for her Tony-Award-winning re-imagining of Walt Disney's The Lion King on Broadway, with giant puppets representing many of the animal stars; her partner, composer Eliot Rosenthal, for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his score for Frida, which Taymor directed. This couple epitomizes current theatre royalty.

The second consideration driving advance publicity was the amount of money that Los Angeles Opera (and their co-producers, the Lincoln Center Theater) were willing to invest in a new opera: $28 million, according to press releases. Is opera dead? Not if companies are willing to give new commissions this level of support.

Is there such a thing as bad publicity? The setting by George Tsypin is dominated by a giant wall of stone and ice that rotates and opens a giant slab to create a smaller, higher stage within the stage. But in the latter stages of rehearsal, the set refused to march to its computer commands. The opening had to be postponed, at a reported additional cost of $300,000. A feeding frenzy arose in the press. The next two scheduled performances were billed as "previews," which means that the plebian audience could pay the same amount for their tickets, but reviewers were not admitted. I (paid a lot of money and) went to the first preview, and thus, in fairness, this should be considered a report rather than a review.

Most successful was the production itself. Taymor's direction nicely recreates the anachronistic aura presented by Gardner, such as when Hrothgar drives a tree-eating combine to raze the forest for the creation of Heorot or architectural projections spin around the scrim as Heorot is built. Equally mesmerizing is the truer-to-period longboat that rows Wealhtheow and a shadow-Grendel through Grendel's dream. Even without scenic effects, the frozen V of Wealhtheow's legs suspended in air provide a striking visual counterpart to Grendel's contemplating her rape/murder. Most spectacular is Grendel's first attack on Heorot, in which the giant puppet mask sends windows and chairs whirling through the air: the mead-benches are toppled indeed.

Constance Hoffman's costumes range from fantastic to mundane. The harp of the Shaper (scop) grows organically from his body. The huge dragon is nothing less than stunning: Denyce Graves comes out of the mouth wearing a long, red, feather-boa train and spiky fingernails that put Flo-Jo to shame. The tail consists of three spikes each containing a Denyce-Graves clone sans boa-to paraphrase Anna Russell, a kind of draconic Andrews Sisters.

I found the fact that Grendel mopes around all night in what looked like a bathrobe and slippers less goofy than did my friends who attended the opera with me, but who were the amorphous beast-like puppet figures that occasionally wandered on or across stage, but never took part in the action? For that matter, although the snake dance was really cool, what did it have to do with the plot? And what was the point of the suspended boulder on the side of the giant slab? I kept expecting it to crash down in a Wile E. Coyote scheme on Grendel's part, but to my disappointment, the boulder never moved.

A larger query is raised by the music and libretto. Grendel is saddled with a fairly thankless vocal line. On top of that, he is made to sing phrases like: "These brattling birds!" or "I am aware in my chest of tuberstirring." Such annoying conjunction of unintelligible text and dense music means that the audience is forced to rely on projected supertitles, only to discover that the words don't actually mean anything. Most of the text not sung by Grendel is in Old English, which I had particularly looked forward to hearing. Although the young Hrothgar was clearly speaking a Germanic language, it wasn't until the beginning of the second act that I actually recognized the words Unferth is cumen, hardly a moment that rewarded years of Anglo-Saxon studies.

I offer two excuses for my failure. First, the choral diction seemed to completely lack affricates and gutturals, which made the text sound more Romance than Germanic. Second, the projected titles often diverged to various degrees from the libretto. The most egregious example occurs in Scyld Scefing's funeral, where the sung lines (moved from the ending of the poem) are:

Geworhton him þa Wedrea leode
hleo on hoe; se was heah ond brad ...
(The people of the Weders made for him then
a barrow on the cliff; it was high and broad ...)

but the projected titles read:

Wind and weeping cut across the headland,
Like new-forged swords plunged into flames.

If you have this sort of divergence between the titles and the words being sung, certainly the audience doesn't know what the actual words mean, and one wonders which, if any, subtext the chorus is meant to project. It seems as if the creative team thought: we want some Olde Englishe text, but it doesn't actually matter what it says since we'll pretend it means whatever we want. One sees this type of disjunction between text and titles occasionally with revivals of older operas (I've done it myself for various directors). But in this case, and allow me some heightened emphasis here, WHY DO IT WITH A BRAND-NEW LIBRETTO?

Finally, in this particular case, I think, write less of it. This opera is longer and wordier than the unvariegated, somewhat atonal music can carry, and several scenes seem extraneous. Grendel's opening monologue, with the "brattling birds" and the "tuberstirring," drags on. Unferth's first scene in which he acts the hero is entertaining and should remain simply for Grendel's line, "This shit-ass scene was his idea, not mine," but Unferth's descent to the mere doesn't make sense and adds nothing to the plot. Most individual scenes could use judicious application of the shears. There's just too much chatty filler, the music isn't interesting enough to carry it, and the moralizing doesn't lend itself to the visual effects that Taymor designs so well. This needs to be a one-act opera-it worked for Wagner's Flying Dutchman and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, and it would work much better for Rosenthal's Grendel.

That said, the quality of the performances was very high, right down to dancer Desmond Richardson's spectacular portrayal of Beowulf at the end of the opera. It is a stroke of brilliance to present Beowulf as a dancer: Grendel's task is to engage him in battle, not conversation. Eric Owens showed astounding stamina in the difficult and taxing role of Grendel, but Denyce Graves unfairly walked away with the show in the far-shorter role of the Dragon. (This is undoubtedly due in part to the fact that the vocal line, although demanding a wide range, allowed the text to be clearly understood without recourse to projected titles. Her repeated advice to Grendel-"find some gold, not mine, and sit on it"-was greeted each time with a roar of laughter.)

When Miss Graves appeared for her curtain call, the audience jumped to their feet and continued their cheering through the appearances of Mr. Owens, the conductor Steven Sloane, and Eliot Rosenthal. There were several company bows. It was an event, and, although I was sometimes bored by the music, I was glad to be there.

Editor's note. Lisi Oliver teaches in the English Department at Louisiana State University. Her research interests are medieval law, medieval languages and linguistics, and opera libretti.