ENO/Orphée review: Homage to Cocteau’s dotty take on the narcissistic poet

At one point in English National Opera’s staging of Philip Glass’s 1993 opera Orphée, a character says, “Don’t look to me for help. I don’t know much more than you.” I know the feeling: the opera’s morbid mysticism and trance-like logic are both entrancing and perplexing, and that’s no bad thing.

Glass based Orphée on Jean Cocteau’s black-and-white, deliriously dotty film from 1950. In Cocteau’s telling, and hence Glass’s, Orphée — Orpheus — is a narcissistic, mid-20th-century poet, equally out of touch with avant-garde ideas and his wife Eurydice. He becomes obsessed with a sinister princess, who represents death, or perhaps Orphée’s death drive.

Glass’s text, sticking close to the film’s dialogue, was originally sung in French; ENO uses a new translation by Netia Jones (the show’s director) and Emma Jenkins. Some vocal colour is lost and, deliberately or not, the new text raises a few smiles that neither Glass nor Cocteau perhaps intended, but it carries the sense well. Glass conceived Orphée on a small scale. Jones turns it into a wide-screen spectacular, telling much of the story through hyperactive, largely monochrome projections.

We get brief glimpses of Cocteau’s film, which Jones also evokes in the costumes, and in the repeated motifs of mirrors, screens and doorways. But her staging (the sets are by Lizzie Clachan) is no simple re-creation; it has its own story to tell.

By the composer’s standards, Glass’s orchestra, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, is relatively subdued but the vocal lines are always sympathetic to the singers. Nicholas Lester captures Orphée’s destructive self-absorption, while Sarah Tynan plays Eurydice as a drab housewife who’s no match for the princess’s allure. Jennifer France embodies that character’s fatal glamour.

Until November 29 (020 7845 9300, eno.org)