BOOK OF MOUNTAINS AND SEAS
Edinburgh International Festival
★★★★
“a piece that is uniquely modern, despite multiple traditions from the past that have inspired the work”
Composer Huang Rho, puppeteer Basil Twist, and Ars Nova Copenhagen bring an innovative contemporary opera to the Royal Lyceum Theatre as part of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival. Book of Mountains and Seas is a UK premiere produced by Beth Morrison Projects, which specializes in the creation of opera and new music theatre. Basil Twist directs a multi-talented ensemble of puppeteers, singers and percussionists in this contemporary opera on environmental themes linked to classical Chinese mythology.
Book of Mountains and Seas is also the title of a large collection of Chinese myths that were written down about 2500 years ago. For this opera, composer and librettist Huang Rho picked four myths from the collection: The Legend of Pan Gu; The Spirit Bird; The Ten Suns, and Kua Fu Chasing the Sun. The first is a Chinese creation myth explaining the meaning of yin and yang; the second about a princess who drowns in the sea and becomes a bird to take revenge; the third, a continuation of the creation story in which ten suns, living in a mulberry tree, threaten the survival of the earth and have to be reduced in number, and finally, a myth about the giant Kua Fu who gets too close to the sun. These may seem rather perplexing narratives until you realize that Huang Rho and Basil Twist are creating a contemporary myth of their own, drawn from ancient sources. A mix of Chinese culture and echoes of more modern, western, cultures. A myth in which ancient stories are reimagined as larger than life figures rising up or swooping about the stage, each with a tale that reveals the fragility of the creatures in the environment we call our world.
Basil Twist and his puppeteers have created a series of abstract, sculptural figures, made out of silk, paper lanterns and driftwood. The dexterity of the puppeteers to move these figures, together with the spare, yet precise choreography of their own movements, produce a performance that integrates perfectly with the equally spare, sculptural quality of the sounds that Huang Rho has composed for his singers and percussionists. Huang Rho’s libretto connects the past with the present (even the future?) with words that are both Mandarin and a language he has invented. And the ease with which Ars Nova Copenhagen produce these sounds is a result of their vocal experience with the past and present: Renaissance polyphony, and new choral compositions. The overall impression of Book of Mountains and Seas is a piece that is uniquely modern, despite multiple traditions from the past that have inspired the work.
For some, the aesthetic of this work may seem almost too austere. It is, after all, a piece that encompasses creation myths in all their diversity and richness. In the Basil Twist/Huang Rho imaginings, the world is collapsed into circles from which mythic creatures arise. The stars are likewise confined within a circle at the back of the stage. The colour palette is sparse in the set design, though this does accentuate the shapes and colours of the driftwood and the lanterns. The silk that plays the ocean becomes a canvas for any number of marine dramas playing out in its constantly moving waves. The faces of the singers are similarly reduced to just circles that sing, their bodies shrouded in black, echoing the puppeteers. Only at the end, when the giant Kua Fu’s walking stick becomes a shower of peach blossoms, do brighter colours emerge. The lighting of designer Ayumu ‘Poe’ Saegusa turns up the heat, and the daylight, for the final moments of the show. The show moves at a pace that remind us that world building is rarely a speedy process. The sounds, and the Chinese characters that are projected from time to time on a variety of screens, are not designed to anchor us in a conventional narrative. Instead, we snatch at hints in sparse lines in English, announcing the emergence of a new scene.
Book of Mountain and Seas is a remarkable collaboration between some of the most innovative and exciting artists working in puppetry and contemporary music theatre today. It is a piece that requires some patience. But it’s an important event that serves to remind us of how innovative artists can be when confined only by the limits of their own imaginations and creativity.
BOOK OF MOUNTAINS AND SEAS
Edinburgh International Festival
Reviewed on 14th August 2025 at Edinburgh Royal Lyceum Theatre
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Andrew Perry
