The War

Roughly 3000 years after Homer wrote The Illiad, men still wage wars and artists still turn those wars into art. Vladimir Pankov plunges into that clash—of beauty and barbarism, creation and destruction—in this operatic spectacular.

The War is a re-enactment of sorts: a Parisian artistic colony learn that their friend George, a painter, has died a week before armistice in 1918, possibly at his own hand. To understand his motives and contest his cowardice, they stage his experiences of the Western Front, spliced into The Illiad’s structure.

George is an artist at heart, not a soldier. He’s incapable of hating his enemy, men just like him in different uniforms. Unlike his comrades, he refuses to become an empty, unthinking greatcoat – 60 of which form a ghostly battalion onstage. He’s too human for this hell; of sniper rifles trained on latrines and clouds of chlorine gas.

Pankov conjures that world in a bombastic, determinedly beautiful staging. Atonal arias stream through the space. Grandstanding images abound: a swinging chandelier, gasmasked angels, pianos like tanks. It’s a visual feast, but oddly unfeeling: too prescriptive in equating beauty and spectacle. There’s no vulnerability, no humanity.

That somewhat scuppers his case. Pankov argues that art, being innately human, must oppose war as inhumane. But since war is so human—and so extremely human—art must fixate upon it. That sees war glorified, beautified, extended. He never lets us forget that there’s an art to war and a war beneath art.

The War is best as an aesthetics lecture, but, as theatre, it’s impressive without making much of an impression.