Castellucci’s title arrives via Augustine and, more immediately, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — “To Carthage then I came” — and the piece has the quality of a ruin visited rather than a play performed. Its sound, composed by Scott Gibbons, is made from human hair; in each city the work engages local long-haired artists, so the instrument is rebuilt from the place itself. Seen previously in Brussels and Berlin, it comes to Baku in a space that answers it exactly: the Museum of Stone Chronicle, a former Siemens power station turned into a hall of carved stone. Castellucci arrives in Baku in a landmark season, having premiered a new opera at the Salzburg Festival and a new theatre work, Faust, this autumn.
