What an experience! It’s physicality was a matter of bodily sensation. If this was the vibe of the Festival, it will certainly go with a bang!
It is a remarkable play, performed by a truly remarkable actor. It is a sad, funny, astonishing, brilliant, interesting, thought-provoking and utterly energizing play.
Apart from a deep understanding of the poem itself, timing, phrasing, nuance and feeling all have to be there, all of which Morse gives to this massive work.
Michael Tippet famously said that to set a text you must first “break the back of the poetry”. I have never seen this done more effectively than in this opera.
The men who abuse just don’t get it and it’s not in their interest to do so. But, if this play is a good portrayal of the truth, the women don’t either.
The audience, subdued by the sheer power of the writing and the mastery of the performances, sits seemingly stunned by what they are hearing, but we all chose to see this play because we have a need to know and the actors to see if they can pull it off.
We certainly are given a fair range of material to give us an insight into the rank stench, the rats, lice, endless rain, bodies in the trenches, yearning for home, the horrible wounds and ghastly deaths, the vile, cruel, terrifying gas and the forever present mud – thick, slimy, stinking, clinging, drowning mud.
This play, Marathon, written by Edoardo Erba and translated from the Italian, was the reason the two protagonists Ross Vosvotekas and Adam Cirillo have been in training since October to meet this remarkable physical challenge.