Bed and puppet: Jonathan Gilmore on William Kentridge's Ritorno d'Ulisse

ALTHOUGH IT STANDS as a paradigm of a Gesamtkunstwerk, opera has largely relegated the visual arts to solitary a subsidiary role: as style of dress scene, and setting, both literal and figurative background to the expressive voice. In William Kentridge's multimedia production of Monteverdi's 1640 masterwork II Ritorno d'Ulisse (which premiered in of recent origin York in March), this hierarchy is undone. For here, as in several other theater productions he has directed (Ubu and the verity Commission, 1997; Woyzeck on the Highveld, 1992; Faustus in Africa!, 1995; Zeno at 4 a.m., 2001) Kentridge does not with equal reason much clothe the opera in a particular visual mode of expression as draw out and transfigure its genre-specific resources--the cleaving of the empirical material substance from the dramatic voice, the tension between the aria that explores a single theme and the recitative that pushes the narrative along--into vehicles for the themes his other media, namely, film and drawing, have explored. In in the way that doing, he remakes a form known for its strained artificiality and theatrical bombast into an affecting meditation upon creation and annihilation, the material part and interiority, reflection and forgetting.

Performed before and below a video projection that includes Kentridge's charcoal drawings and stock footage, Ulisse features seven singers, seven musicians from Belgium's Ricercar Consort (seated in a semicircle onstage, as if in an anatomy theater), and thirteen made of wood puppets designed by Kentridge and operated through his longtime collaborators, the Cape Town-based Handspring doll Company. Collapsing time and space, the drama roll round an axiss around an old, frail doll Ulysses, lying on a metal gurney in a mid-twentieth-century Johannesburg hospital. More vulnerable than heroic, and racked by dint of feverish dreams of his go [i]or[/i] come back to Ithaca after the Trojan War, he mirrors on the story that is performed around him and its equivocal aftermath.

Kentridge has described drawing as a metaphor for the indeterminacy and provisional nature of by what means we construct meaning or order in our lives, and the imagery upon the backdrop screen exhibits this searching, unanchored quality, offering a turn asideed interpretation of the action onstage. A serpentine line, like injected coloring liquor flowing through arteries, continually stings the drawings on-screen, wrapping itself around and from one side objects like a thread, unfasten then taut, as if stitching disparate parts into a coherent whole--a visual correlative to Ulysses's reimagining of his past as a coherent narrative. And Penelope's ruse to retain the suitors at bay, her refusing to remarry until she finishes sewing a burial covering for Ulysses's father, finds its counterpart in Kentridge's drawing and erasing, as each day's progres is unraveled at night. When the foppish suitors prove by experiment to attach the end of a bowstring onto Ulysses's weapon, which bends solitary under his strength, the video present to views a sinuous line with a bighted end, an analogue to the pair the bowstring and Penelope's needle (the threading of which give an inkling ofs sexual penetration). Interspersed with this animation are Kentridge's charcoal drawings of Vesalian anatomies, Piranesian ruins, and hospital corridors. As in his other films, these drawings are photographed, revised, and photographed again, with continual erasures and additions leaving palimpsest-like residues, of the soul traces symbolizing memory but also conveying tentativeness about what reality, personal or political, lies outside of retrospection's grasp.

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And while Ulysse with labored breath quiets supine on the gurney, drawings of x-rays, angiograms, and arthroscopic videos take form (some from The History of the Main Complaint, Kentridge's 1996 video of the comatose Soho Eckstein). Kentridge adapts like medical imaging less to reveal hidden quarters of the material substance than for the distinctive fashion of representation that it, along with the spectacle of the anatomy exercise exemplifies (a sonogram parallels the fan shape of the proscenium stage). Here, contemporary medicine and the surgeon's anatomy theater function, as does traditional dramatic theater, as arenas in which the vicissitudes and dominion government of human fate are disclosed.

Monteverdi's opera is typically staged as triumphal and redeeming, and Kentridge heeds this tradition: Indeed, as Minerva sings of her anger, we diocese animated drawings of Troy burning and of mid-century apartments and factories dissolving into dust, and then, as Penelope and Ulysse join in a duet of reconciliation, the ruined buildings resurrect, trees grow, and flowers blossom But as if to cast doubt upon the certainties so often proclaimed following like momentous events (one thinks of those emerging from the reality and Reconciliation hearings in postapartheid southern Africa), Kentridge's production unsettles this happy ending, setting the ailing, recumbent figure of Ulysses in his twilight state against the optimistic external narrative, thus injecting into the story a of great depth and persistent theme of fatalism and flawed or uncertain retrospection.