8 - Window in the Wall: Looking for Grand Opera in John Gardner's Grendel

Summary

The Wall works!’ That is how Anthony Tommasini, writing in the New York Times, began his review of Grendel: Transcendence of the Great Big Bad, an opera based on John Gardner's eponymous novel. In development for over two decades, the opera was given its first performances in Los Angeles and New York in 2006. Grendel was composed by Elliot Goldenthal; Julie Taymor directed. The wall to which Tommasini referred was the centrepiece of the production, forty-eight feet wide, twenty-eight feet high, and nine feet deep. Weighing forty thousand pounds and manoeuvred by twenty-six motors, the ‘ice-earth unit’ was rich in both practical and symbolic meaning. On one side was earth, the world of heroes; on the other was ice, the realm of monsters. The object, balky as well as bulky, overshadowed the work it was intended to support, prompting Tommasini to ask, ‘Opera has long embraced spectacle, but isn't it supposed to be a music-driven art form?’

The ‘earth-ice unit’ rotated 200 degrees; it featured a central panel weighing four tons which, when lowered, formed a playing space balanced between the wall's two worlds. In that position, the platform opened a window in the wall and connected the opposed physical and moral worlds of the opera's textual sources, Gardner's novel and Beowulf itself. There was, predictably, much talk about what the set did and little, if any, commentary on what, as either wall or window, it meant. Like any stage properties, no matter what size, the wall and the window, as objects ostended within a playing space, helped to shape the drama. But windows and walls are particularly potent elements of a stage set. They embody literal and symbolic meanings essential to the theatre as ‘a place for viewing’ and raise two issues relevant to a volume about modern views of the medieval.

First, since it served as a miniature stage, the platform created meta-drama; the use of puppets, along with the actors miniaturized in puppet form, accentuated this aspect of Grendel. Meta-narrative now seems coy, and puppets, made famous by Taymor in other projects, including The Lion King, have become cliché. But it is nonetheless true that both Beowulf and Gardner's Grendel are rich in stories-within-stories and in performances that, among other things, are about performance.