Carles Santos thinks like a musician. That's why his theatrical presentations have such an abstract quality. A classically trained pianist who was drawn first to the avant garde and then to the conceptual arts, Santos has become music theatre's answer to Salvador Dalí, a playful jester with a serious but elliptical purpose.
The Composer, the Singer, the Cook and the Sinner is a tribute to Gioacchino Rossini, the 19th-century Italian composer best remembered for The Barber of Seville. Although the Edinburgh festival's promise of a "celebration of Rossini's life and music" is accurate in its way, you're likely to leave with more questions than answers. For, despite the 80-minute show taking us on a whirlwind tour of choice Rossini moments, from grand symphony recordings to a beautiful solo requiem at the end, it attempts nothing in the way of narrative coherence.
Instead, we get a series of striking and provocative images prompted primarily by Rossini's reputation as a hedonist, bon viveur and gourmet. Notably, there is the duet sung by a prostrate man looking up a woman's skirt through a Perspex chair while ejaculating from an enormous phallus. Equally vivid, if less contentious, is the head of the chef that appears from inside an electric oven, slowly to be subsumed by smoke.
The theme of the piece is water, from the initial tempo-setting drops falling from the ceiling to the torrents that cascade mercilessly on to the singers. When Santos himself appears at a baby grand, his piano spurts water into busts of Verdi and Wagner, a metaphor for the composer's influence on later generations, although he could equally be saying that Rossini pisses all over them.
Either way, it's remarkable stuff, if less extravagantly eccentric than previous shows. But for me, Santos always impresses more than he entertains. Rather like Dalí, the boldness of his imagination leaves me cold where others are delighted.
