What’s Going On (UK)

Waiting for the Barbarians
Philip Glass opera at the Barbican Centre
Thursday, June 12, 7.30 p.m.

Waiting for the Barbarians by composer Philip Glass takes its inspiration from the J. M. Coetzee novel of the same name. Set in a small frontier town ruled by a military bureaucracy, the opera tells the harrowing story of escalating conflict between oppressors and oppressed. Writing on his personal website, Glass explains that, ‘I contacted John Coetzee about adapting his book into an opera back in 1991 and made my first treatment of the opera that same year… My aim…was to preserve Coetzee’s bold allegorical approach while dramatizing the classic themes of confrontation, crisis and redemption so the audience itself is left weighing the meaning of good and evil in their own lives… That the opera can become an occasion for dialogue about political crisis illustrates the power of art to turn our attention toward the human dimension of history.’

J. M. Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice, most recently in 1999 for his novel Disgrace. An early extract from his 2002 novel, Youth, appeared in Granta 77: ‘What We Think of America’.

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