As an energetic and self-effacing tenor, Oke appears in every scene giving a vocally flawless performance. His progression from Barrister Gandhi to the “half-naked Faqueer” is equally faultless. “I am not trying to ape Gandhi in any mannerism. What I am trying to do is to ape him as a contemplative and thoughtful man. You can go down the road of mimicry to some extent but after that it has to be something else that you can relate to the person that you are playing”, he says.

To help the foreign audience, the English translation of Sanskritised libretto appears on the corrugated iron backdrop that is imaginatively used to portray the colonial age as well as the poverty that Gandhi so intentionally embraced. And then there are hundreds of newspapers vividly moulded into distorted men and animals to depict the fight between the good and the evil. Newspaper is used as a remarkable device to represent public opinion as well as stones to hit out at the opponent. “As everyone associates Gandhi with poverty, it seemed appropriate for us to choose humble materials to inspire the production”, says Crouch.

Director Phelim McDermott uses another mesmerising device to show the universality of Satyagraha. The opera is divided into three acts and during each act peeping from a window are three men — Tolstoy, Tagore and Martin Luther King — that were central to Gandhi’s epic story. “Those figures are really outside time, even though they represent the past present and future; they stand for the idea of Satyagraha”, says McDermott. “It’s multi-layered and non-linear; you could almost enter the piece at any point and experience the whole thing”, he adds.

... contd.