Doomed Romance Dusted with Snow
La Bohème
by Giacomo Puccini, libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on a novel by Henri Murger
English National Opera, London Coliseum until 22nd February
Review by Georgia Renwick
It’s that time of year again … The fires are lit (well, the heating is on at least!), the heavy coats are out of hibernation and we all dream of (or dread) a fresh coating of snow. It is important I stress that I welcome snow, before likening its return to that of La Bohème at The Colosseum; you half expect it, but are still delighted by that first flurry. As the first notes of Puccini’s quintessential winter opera quiver into the cavernous opera house, you can virtually hear the audience in their plush velvet seats sigh in blissful anticipation.
This production marks English National Opera’s fourth revival of director Jonathan Miller’s 2009 La Bohème, set charmingly in 1930s Paris. It also coincides with the forty-year anniversary of Miller’s ENO directional debut. It is by no means unusual for favourite versions of this opera to be revived time and time again, the Royal Opera House called “final curtain” on their 41-year-old John Copley production only a couple of years ago, and there are many qualities not only in the classic story but in this Miller production that I can anticipate enduring for years to come.
The modern English language translation by Amanda Holden is sparky and genuinely funny, the young bohemian artists under Miller’s direction cavorting and playful. They play-fight physically, which balances beautifully with their heavy romanticism. They are believable as young men trying to make a go of their craft, pitted against the poverty and despondency of inter-war Paris and the threat of dreaded tuberculosis.
The set is a living, breathing dolls’ house: full-scale rooms, easily possible at The Coliseum, with intricate details that draw you in. An eager eye (and a good seat) and you can spy drying paintbrushes and soiled linens. In Act Two the artists’ studio opens out, pushed by costumed stagehands, into Cafe Momus, where dozens of singers flood the stage to bring to life Christmas Eve in Paris. It is a spectacle the principal characters, quite literally, get lost in. You would be foolish in fact, to let them distract you from the dozens of stories taking place all around them. Pickpockets skulk, lovers disappear into the night or behind closed doors, parents chase their over-excited children, delirious at the sight of toy drums and sugar canes. The attention to detail in Miller’s Bohème is true nostalgic bliss, made to get lost in.
Of course, La Bohème endures but it has long had the popular vote. Indeed, it’s opening in 1896 saw such popularity it went against Puccini’s reputation in critical circles. A quote from Roger Parker’s insightful programme notes from critic Eduard Hanslick reads “This is new, a sensational break with the last romantic and artistic traditions in opera”. It is clear in the context of his full review, he did not intend this as a compliment. Brought forward a few decades it may be, Miller’s production still relies aesthetically on sentimentality and nostalgia, which does belie its original impact. For a simple seamstress, Mimi’s neat pin-curls are perhaps a little too perfect for her to be believably impoverished, in fact, they look enviably glossy.
There have been versions of La Bohème which have radically changed the aesthetic to fit the times, and offer the story to a new, and non-opera-going audiences. Robin Norton-Hale’s 2009 version at the 35-seater Cockpit Tavern pub theatre, went on to win an Olivier in 2011 with its stripped back modern day production set in a messy student flat in Kilburn. 
Appearing in another guise, the late Jonathan Larson’s 1990s cult rock-opera RENT, is in fact based very closely on La Bohème with Tuberculosis transposed for AIDS, and poets and painters for aspiring musicians and film makers. These productions serve to prove that the story, in its many versions, endures and will doubtless continue to do so in more yet-to-be-realised stagings and in other formats.
Naturally, ENO has evolved and modernised in many ways outside of the staging of this production (you may have seen the bright pink My Little Pony poster promoting their latest production of Salome) and is of course not only concerned with bringing back, but with pushing forward. On opening night, two young, rising-star performers make their ENO debut here in the primary roles of the two lovers, Rudolfo and Mimi: Chilean born, American trained and devilishly handsome tenor Jonathan Tetelam and mesmerising Welsh talent Natalya Romaniw, respectively. It’s a winning combination of traditional material, nostalgic staging and fresh blood.
As one of the longest continually played operas of all time, La Bohème isn’t going anywhere, but it’s a wonderful time of the year to be whirled by this doomed romance, dusted with snow.
Georgia Renwick
November 2018
Photography by Robert Workman
Hallelujah !
The Messiah
by Patrick Barlow
Simon Friend and Birmingham Repertory Theatre at Richmond Theatre until 1st December, then on tour until 5th January
Review by Mark Aspen
Tea-towel headdresses, toy sheep, false beards. Doesn’t all this seem familiar from school nativity plays, memories that induce smiles or cringes, but so far away from the commercial onslaught that is twenty-first century’s pillage of Christmas. Between “Black Friday” (how did such a sinister-sounding name become associated with the season of goodwill?) and Advent, starting this Sunday, Richmond Theatre has launched our theatre Christmas season with The Messiah, which is a most unlikely candidate to bring out a true Christmas spirit … but it does!
Maurice Rose is suffering a mid-life crisis. Tired of the direction of his life, he has chucked in his job as a Hoover salesman in Debenhams, and the vacuum in his life is filled by his passion for the theatre. He had dabbled in am-dram, but has now decided to set up a theatre company. He is also fired up with another passion, a feeling that the world should be a better place. Filled with evangelical fervour, he has written a play with a message that he wants everyone to know. It is the story of Christmas, lifting the school nativity, he hopes, to an uplifting experience for adults too.
Maurice has also sunk at lot of money in the project it seems, judging by the lavish set, a grand revolve with a dozen Doric columns. Lots of gold and royal blues, a drape backdrop of the hills around Bethlehem and a ground-row cut-out of the town itself complete the scenery, which unfortunately as yet has no stage hands to manipulate the winch handle (prepare for pun on a well-known oratorio). Oh, and there are not enough channels on Maurice’s lighting rig, so things have to be plugged and unplugged to get the spectacular lighting effects that he is aiming for. Designer Francis O’Connor and lighting designer Howard Hudson skilfully achieve not-quite-there-yet feel of the set within the set.
Fortunately for Maurice, he has recruited a loyal chum, Ronald Bream, to support his project. Ronald is the general factotum but also his fellow actor, Maurice having cast him in, er well, all the other parts not played by the writer-producer-director … and some of those where Maurice cannot be in two places at once. All this doubling and splitting of roles adds to the confusion of the simple and kind-hearted Ronald, who is neither quite up to the complexities of the stagecraft nor to the pretentiousness of Maurice’s script.
Hugh Dennis is very much at ease with the role of Maurice Rose, ready with the sardonic remark and quick put-down, whilst his ill at ease character wrestles with a self-doubt which bubbles through the surface of confidence. Dennis is best known as a comedy panel-game performer and the skills which he has honed there transfer usefully into this role.
Ronald first appears to be the stooge part, an allusion invoked by the Chaplin-esque portrayal by John Marquez. It’s there, the shock of curly hair, the too-tight jacket, the trousers arguing with the shoes, the splay feet. But Ronald is Maurice’s prop in both senses of the word, and the shift from stooge to sage (sage as wise man as well as Wise Man) is neatly effected by Marquez.
Maurice is keen that his new show should not only be a success but have an up-market appeal. He has hit on an idea to achieve his aims by engaging, possibly at some expense, an opera singer to provide entr’actes to his nativity play in the shape of excerpts from Handel’s Messiah, the Christmas bits. But due to his budget constraints, he has settled on Mrs Leonora Fflyte, a diva whose career has recently been on the back-burner. Mrs F, as Ronald deferentially calls her, keeps a haughty eye on proceedings, willing to go along with Maurice’s directing of his “experimental” piece, until she gets the momentum up with a powerful burst of the oratorio. (Singing with “bit between her teeth”?)
Lesley Garrett, the renowned opera and crossover singer, gamely takes on the role of Leonora (“Lay-en-ora” she insists) Fflyte, a bold move for a Principal Soprano at the English National Opera. Some of the highlights of the production are when Garrett takes us briefly away from the comedy into the sublime moments of Händel’s masterpiece. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”, “Come unto Him, all ye that labour” and of course for Christmas “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given” were particularly beautiful and moving, alas only heard in tantalising snatches. But my, doesn’t it sound different when singing an oratorio a capella and without a chorus.
Without a chorus, except for Maurice and Ronald, who have a way to go before they reach ENO standard. Lesley Garrett has tutored Dennis and Marquez, but our two protagonists are not meant to be singers. And that is where the skill lies in this production, good actors and one brilliant singer playing poor actors and not so good singers. It is the play within the play conundrum, plus here we also have an oratorio within the play within the play. Are you following? It is Händel’s (real) Messiah, within Maurice Rose’s (fictitious) The Messiah, within Patrick Barlow’s (real) The Messiah.
Patrick Barlow is both writer and director of The Messiah and in both respects steers the play through the choppy channel between the fictitious bad players and the good real players. The first Act kicks off with the rehearsals for Maurice’s The Messiah, with worn visual gags, and a script of weak malapropisms (try “trauma” as “trousers”), spoonerisms (“unpart into” instead of “impart unto”), puns, and tongue twisters. (Although the monk who sat in his “cassock in Hassocks on a tussock in Sussex” is not bad as they go.) By the end of the Act things do liven up as the action spills into the auditorium and we get some audience participation. (Don’t worry nobody is pulled up on stage: that comes later in the Christmas season.) Dennis animates the audience to heckle Caesar Augustus’ tribune about the census. Some are even cued into part of script. (Was that a reference comparing Rome to the EU, with standing up and being counted?) By the interval one might feel short-changed, but then comes Act Two.
This is very much a play of two halves. In Act Two, all becomes clear that the feeble comedy of the first half is merely Maurice’s; and now things widen out. There is a priceless comic scene when the revolve turns as the Three Wise Men are on their travels and one, Ronald, can’t get on. This is a piece of well worked physical theatre involving all three actors, adroitly choreographed by Siân Williams, and involving acrobatic tumbling. Lesley Garrett has circus skills, surely unusual for an opera singer, and can even tightrope walk. Here those skills were invaluable.
Outside of the broad comedy, the scene showing the determination of the Wise Men is inspiring, the scene of the slaughter of the Holy Innocents horrifying, and the birth scene truly touching. The last is a full lecture in practical obstetrics!
Eventually, Ronald rebels against the overbearing and overambitious Maurice, calling him “a toad” and taunting him over his recent divorce. He tries to enlist Mrs F, but Maurice turns on him and chases him around the auditorium, while Mrs F attempts to hide her embarrassment with a quick aria from La bohème. However, it is this episode that is the catalyst for the denouement and the revelation of the true meaning of Christmas. Maurice is totally overcome emotionally by the enactment of the birth and falls into paroxysms of self-introspection, blaming his inner “toad”. Then he realises the message of hope and redemption in the Christmas story, and the two men are reconciled in a spirit of brotherly love.
The final scene is the shepherds in the hills. One of the shepherds, Ronald, believes in angels, but has never seen one. Ironically, it is when he goes to count the sheep that Maurice sees the heavenly host, usefully including Mrs F singing Händel’s Hallelujah Chorus. He explains to Ronald that seeing one angel is like seeing “one bee”, whereas seeing the Christ child is like seeing “a whole summer”.
It was with some trepidation that I took up the invitation to review The Messiah. The promos looked as if it might be skating on the thin ice between being funny and being offensive. Blasphemy is a word that is no longer used (at least not in European usage), but treading on establish deeply held beliefs is not to be taken lightly. I need not have worried.
Patrick Barlow’s The Messiah can be enjoyed on many levels. It can be enjoyed for the sheer knockabout of the slapstick and the juvenile humour. It can be enjoyed for the human story, if you get past Act One. But most importantly, it can be enjoyed for its expression of the true Christmas message. Hugh Dennis’ father is The Right Reverend John Dennis, the former Bishop of St Edmunds: I wonder what he thinks?
Meanwhile, there’s the nostalgia for past nativity plays … and for tea-towel headdresses, toy sheep, false beards.
Mark Aspen
November 2018
Photography by Robert Day
Butterflies at Midnight
Cendrillon
by Jules Massenet, libretto by Henri Cain
Glyndebourne Opera, New Victoria Theatre, Woking until 23rd November, then tour continues until 1st December.
Review by Mark Aspen
Opéra féerie … a pretty term for a sadly neglected genre. What is dream; what is reality? Why is this magic; why is this actuality? Who am I; who is my personality? For a child, fairy tales build a safe bridge between infantile fantasies and adult realities. Often for the adolescent though, the bridge feels as if it is crumbling. So, just in case “pretty” sounds like beauty sweetened, Fiona Shaw’s direction of Glyndebourne’s first ever production of Cendrillon adds a delightful piquancy to Massenet’s mix of magic and l’amore … topped with a surprise garnish à la mode.
Visually Cendrillon is magic! Designer, Jon Bausor and lighting designer, Anna Watson, both new to Glyndebourne, have created a mystic world of mirrors, prismatic periaktoi of glass. Set against rich blues and greens, floats an ethereal pastel realm, inhabited by fleeting figures, in a “now you see them now you don’t” fantasy. The soft, delicate and flowing is set against the hard, brittle and crystalline.
The set beautifully complements Massenet’s fine filigree of a score that interweaves voice, music and chorus into a gossamer of lyrical music. Cendrillon teases out the subtleties and psychological insights of Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, the original story written 1698 that is the evolutionary precursor of the children’s fairy tale, Victorian pantomimes and modern films. Two centuries on, Massenet understood that Perrault’s parable holds a mirror to human nature and is not just a story of virtue overcoming cruelty. Within the familiar framework of the story, Massenet’s librettist Henri Cain interpolated an episode in which the distraught heroine, thinking she has lost her Prince Charming, runs off in near-suicidal turmoil and falls asleep in a wood. In a dream conjured by the Fairy Godmother, her al-fresco resting place becomes a magic bower, in which they are united in a mystical consummation ceremony.
The bower gives ample opportunity for singing spirits and dancing imps to create fascinating tableaux reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but without asinine liaisons. A lithe troupe of five contemporary dancers, choreographed seamlessly by Sarah Fahie, animates this landscape, and indeed all of the scenes, in keeping with delicate web of the music and adding to the wit and humour that also runs under the opera.
One of these dancers is discovered as the overture starts while a leprechaun cobbler sits making a slipper. In a prelude dumbshow with the child Lucette, who in a decade or so is to become known as Cendrillon, the child, beautifully enacted by Megan Silburn, tries on the slipper. The slipper is one of several visual motifs that reappear. Butterflies are ubiquitous, and if its symbolism is of emerging sexual awareness, then perhaps also is the slipper. Glass in its various forms is also omnipresent, that mirror to human nature and to ourselves.
The elegant pale grey facades of exclusive shops, Bond Street plus, open the opera. Here the stepmother, Madame de la Haltière with her rancorous daughters Noémie and Dorothée shop ‘til they drop. Potuguese soprano Eduarda Melo and mezzo Kezia Bienek take on the ugly sisters with great gusto, sort-of Amy Winehouse and Diana Dors on a binge, meow-meowing about everyone and each other whilst indulging in that modern egocentric obsession, the selfie on the mobile. Agnes Zwierko has great fun with the role the battleaxe mum, Madame de la H, pushing the role towards the direction of the panto dame. All her servants defer tersely to her as they help her struggle into her gaudy gowns for the ball, but not before she has slipped in bum-falsies and corseted herself in Clingfilm, in desperate attempts to buttress her image. Meanwhile, the sisters are being pampered with hyperbolic cosmetics, blushers, Botox and blow-dry. Zwierko’s mezzo has presence and power, used to its full effect in Act IV when she bursts in with the news of the Prince’s entourage coming with the lost slipper, obviously for her daughters, she exultantly announces.
Her poor old hen-pecked husband Pandolphe keeps his head down and wishes himself back in his old countryside home, fishing. He is more comfortable in tweeds, Barbours and bucket-brimmed hats with fishing flies in the hatband, than the white-tie grandeur of the Haltière mansion where his misplaced ambitious social climbing has brought him. William Dazeley’s characterisation of Pandolphe as crushed and world-weary is warmly rounded in his rich baritone. He has some sympathetically touching duets with Lucette, as they remember his late wife, Lucette’s mother, before the soubriquet of Cendrillon attached to her, just as the cinders attached to her cheeks when she was demeaned as the tweenie-maid.
Needless to say, the essence of Cendrillon’s late mother is subsumed in The Fairy. A tall sophisticated, elegant figure, clad in pale she-mink, cool as a catwalk model, yet full of maternal warmth for her protégée, Caroline Wettergreen excels as The Fairy in her balanced acting, whereas the clear purity of her coloratura soprano voice is more then up to the demands of Massenet’s score in its acrobatic runs and trills, which seem almost effortless.
The magical transformation from rags to rich adornments is vested on the somnambulant Cendrillon via the agency of the dancing spirits who whirl her around in a garment-carrier until she emerges in a ball gown of dazzling blue, from a chrysalis to an Adonis Blue butterfly. In case the symbolism is hard to miss, a shadowgraph image of a butterfly flitters across the room. And it is in shadowgraph that we see her coach, formed from the banqueting table and chairs, and the prancing horses, shadows of the fire-dogs alongside the hearth where the ragged Cendrillon still sleeps.
Meanwhile, in the King’s palace, there appears to be concern about the health of the adolescent Prince. We might have put it down to puberty, but The Dean (Anthony Osborne) takes charge, performing some pseudo-surgery, which involves examining his heart, which is now worn on his sleeve, quite literally, while a clock becomes his ersatz ticker. Time, maybe they imply, for coming of age. The King (Adam Marsden) just wants to kick him out of his teenage lassitude.
Alix Le Saux’s appealing portrayal of Cendrillon has great charm, a heroine of selfless fortitude in spite of all her mistreatment. In the breeches role of Prince Charming, Eléonore Pancrazi makes the emotional journey from an indolent and depressed teenager to a confident noble, from being sick with love to being charged with love; for when Cendrillon meets Prince Charming at the ball, it is love at first sight for both. The midnight chimes come all too quickly in the playful frustrations of a mirror-maze. When next they meet it is in the enchantment of the magic bower, where their feeling blossom. Le Saux and Pancrazi are both French mezzo-sopranos, but my, how different are the timbre of their voices. Le Saux has a soft delicacy and Pancrazi’s soprano dramatico has a brooding colour lower in the range. (Massenet calls for a “falcon soprano”, singing in the style of Cornélie Falcon, a contemporary French soprano who sang at l’Opéra in Paris.) When their voices intermingle beautifully in their pulsating love duets, we know that the two lonely adolescents are totally stricken. The duet in the magical bower is accompanied by the chorus and a harp in the wings, an exhilarating ethereal sound that thrills with enchantment.
Massenet brings together a full and contrasting range of women’s voices, Madame de la Haltière with Noémie and Dorothée, The Fairy with Cendrillon and Prince Charming, all different and all amalgamated into a complete musical and dramatic whole. With the other principals and the delightful Glyndebourne Chorus, in top form under chorus master Nicholas Jenkins, the effect is mesmerising.
As with the voices, so with the instruments. Massenet’s complex interlacing of delicate musical strands is sensitively evoked by conductor Duncan Ward, who consummately conjures all the magic form the augmented Glyndebourne Tour Orchestra, which at Woking spills out from the pit with the strings at stalls level, and with occasional excursions into the wings for flute and harp.
And Fiona Shaw’s surprise garnish à la mode ? Well, we discover that not only all that has happened is merely the youthful dream of a pubescent girl, but that it is a Freudian fantasy in which the Prince is a projection of Cendrillon’s erotic attraction to the parlour-maid. To the perceptive, however, there were some subtle signals towards the sapphic denouement. During Cendrillon’s transformation to princess, one of the spirits humorously hands her a small toad which she kisses to no avail and shrugs off. Moreover, didn’t the Prince look remarkably like the parlour-maid all along? It may be argued that Massenet’s prescription that that the Prince should be played by a falcon soprano en travestie nudges the plot in that direction, but it does seem to lay too adult an interpretation of the story. Gender fluidity is part of the Zeitgeist, but this twist in the tale may make things difficult to explain to an accompanying granddaughter. Nevertheless, Shaw presents the concept lightly with unabashed openness. Probably though, the overarching message is that love is to be found close to home, and that love lasts more than ambition.
Massenet’s opéra féerie epitomises the magic of the fairytale, and his entrancing music remains light and delicate as a butterfly, but reflective as a mirror-maze. Fiona Shaw’s Cendrillon stands out as a spellbinding tribute to his insight, and touches the quintessence of the fairytale, a peep into the adult world from the enchantment of childhood.
What is dream? What one fears or desires. Why is this magic? Because life is fascinating. Who am I? Whom I know myself to be.
Mark Aspen
November 2018
Photography by Richard Hubert Smith
Review of /Sylvia\ in English here
Verdrehte Ikone einer ganzer Zeitepoche
/Sylvia\
Von Ja?, nach einem Theaterstück von Stéphane Ghislain Roussel
Ja? Theatre Company im Etcetera Theatre, London bis 18. November
Voila Europe Festival
Bewertung von Louise Rauhreif
Da sitzt sie! Das Monokel ins Gesicht geklemmt, das Haar gestutzt und gescheitelt, das selbe unförmige Karokleid mit dem hohen Kragen, dass man bloß keine weiblichen Kurven erahnen kann. Auf dem Tisch vor ihr sind sorgfältig die Champagner Flöte und ein graviertes Zigarettenetui zurechtgelegt. Am meisten aber ist es die Pose, die spitzen Schultern, kantig und hochgezogen in seltsamem Winkel, die großen Hände, die langen Finger, Beine, Körper, alles verdreht und verdrechselt in bizarrster Anordnung. Das Portrait der Journalistin Sylvia von Harden von Otto Dix mag vielleicht nicht mehr schockieren wie 1926, doch ist es zweifellos eines der unverwechselbarsten, unmittelbar erkennbarsten Gemälde des 20sten Jahrhunderts, schaffte es doch genau was sein Schöpfer sich vorgenommen hatte – eine gesamte Ära auf Leinwand zu bannen.
Dix, berühmt und berüchtigt für seinen nicht gerade vorteilhaften Blick auf die verwahrloste, verrottete Gesellschaft der Weimarer Republik, verzerrte seine Huren, Bettler, Krüppel und Kriegsversehrten, Mörder, Diebe und Zirkusartisten bis ins Groteske, jeder Makel, jede Hässlichkeit überzeichnet und übertrieben wie Comicbuch Fratzen. Der Legende nach traf er Sylvia, ein festes Mitglied der Berliner Intellektuellen – und Literaturszene, in eben jener verdrechselten Pose im Romanischen Café am Kudamm sitzend an und ließ sich hinreißen zu dem Ausruf: “Ich MUSS Sie malen!” Er sah in der groben, harten, großen Type die Personifizierung der Neuen Frau, jenem gerade angesagten, burschikosen Bubikopf-Idealbild der Moderne. Sylvia lässt sich porträtieren, eine Stunde jeden Tag, wochenlang, das Stillsitzen fallt ihr schwer, das Resultat beurteilt sie als “befremdlich”, doch ist sie auch unheimlich stolz auf ihr Bildnis, dass sie noch als alte Frau im Centre Pompidou besucht, um sich danebenstehend fotografieren zu lassen.
Wir lernen Sylvia kennen während sie für den Maler posiert, zappelig, gelangweilt, ihr reger Geist, ihr neugieriger Journalisten-Instinkt kann das Stillsitzen kaum ertragen und über kurz oder lang muss sie uns, dem Publikum, in die Position des observierenden Malers gedrängt, einfach unbedingt etwas erzählen. So ganz genehm ist ihr der bohrende, urteilende Blick des Malers auf ihren Körper nicht – doch irgendwie ist die ungeteilte Aufmerksamkeit auch ganz schmeichelhaft…
Der Geschlechter übergreifende Darsteller Joseph Morgen Schofield spielt Sylvia als eine umwerfend charmante, launige, mal nachdenkliche, mal Witz sprühende scharf beobachtende Klatschtante. Besonders die beinahe bis ins unerträgliche ausgedehnten, genüsslich ausgekosteten Momente der Stille bezeugen seine unglaubliche Bühnenpräsenz. Wir sind ganz im Bann seiner langen Finger, die seelenruhig nach den Zigaretten greifen, den bemalten Lippen die genüsslich inhalieren, innehalten, Rauch ausblasen, wir sehen, nein hören, den Adamsapfel schlucken… Otto Dix malte Sylvia um die traditionellen, gerade aufbrechenden Geschlechterrollen in Frage zu stellen – Monocle, Portrait de S. von Harden, das Theaterstück des Luxemburger Künstlers Stéphane Ghislain Roussel, geschrieben für einen Darsteller nichtspezifischen Geschlechts, möchte im Namen von Sylvia unsere aktuellen Ideen hinsichtlich Geschlechter-Identität oder Geschlechtslosigkeit erforschen. Mit der ersten Englischen Übersetzung des im Original halb Französisch halb deutschen Textes erhofft sich die Ja? Theatre Company, Sylvia, die immer noch das eine oder andere Französische bon mots elegant in ihren Monolog mixt, zu einem mehr internationalen, allgemeingültigen Symbol für Genderfluidity zu erheben. Die weiße Leinwand als Hintergrund dient simultan als Rahmen für die kleine Szenerie und als multimediales Fenster in eine Zukunftsprojektion, in der eine modern Sylvia (Caroline Tyka) einen heutigen Großstadtjungel erkundet. Zunächst tragen die kleinen Filme von rasenden Zügen, Neonlichtern und Straßenlärm schön zur urbanen Atmosphäre bei, während uns Sylvia von den “pailettenglitzernden” Berliner Nächten erzählt. Doch was die zweite Sylvia auf dem Bildschirm, immer wieder unterbrechend mit kurz und kürzer geratenen Deutschen Redefetzen, zum Stück beiträgt, bleibt mehr oder weniger unklar. Vielleicht ist sie einfach da um gegen die schleichende Nostalgie anzukämpfen, die sich schon mal breitmachen kann, wenn Schofield mit der brüchigen Stimme einer Cabaret Diseuse zum Schellack-Platten-Knistern singt. Ein magischer Moment von fragiler Schönheit, sofort unterbunden mit einer selbstironischen Bemerkung – bloß schnell über die eigene Sentimentalität lachen, bevor es ein anderer tut.
Die Unsicherheit der gemeinhin als hässlich oder zumindest unkonventionell befundenen Frau ist unübersehbar, in ihren sehnsüchtigen Beschreibungen des üppigen Fleisches der Cabaret Tänzerin Martha oder dem weichen wollüstigen Wellenhaar einer Anita Berber, jener weiteren Ikone der Zeitepoche, die mit ihrer Schönheit “einfache Männer zu Poeten erheben konnte”. Ob wohl ihr Aktueller, Felix, sich auch für sie, Sylvia, erhängen wurde, wie es ein Verehrer der kurvigen Martha tat? Ob wohl sie, Sylvia, unter Dix geübtem Pinselstrich zu einer rotgelockten Sirene wie Anita Berber werden könnte? Vor unseren Augen erleben wir eine blitzgescheite, gebildete Frau, die dem bohrenden Blick auf ihr Äußeres ausgesetzt, nichts lieber wäre als sinnlich und begehrenswert. Gerne gibt sie sich auch mal ein bisschen dumm und kokett, imitiert den überkandidelten Glamour einer Sally Bowles. Je sündiger desto schicker im Weimarer Berlin, und genau wie der Rest der Gesellschaft ist auch Sylvia der verheißungsvollen Strahlkraft von Klatsch und Tratsch, Skandalen, Moralen und Verruchtheit verfallen. Doch es ist alles nur Pose. Eine Inszenierung. Der Typus der Neuen Frau ist letztendlich ein Konstrukt, ebenso hohl wie das Karokleid, das wie ein verwehtes Gespenst, ein leere Hülle auf dem Stuhl zurück bleibt.
Gerne verbringt man eine Stunde in Gesellschaft der charmanten amüsanten Sylvia, des ebenso charmanten amüsanten Joseph Morgen Schonfield. Otto Dix mag berühmt gewesen sein für seinen “bösen Blick”, ohne Erbarmen jeden Makel hervorzerrend – /Sylvia\ hingegen widmet sich mit Mitgefühl und Wohlwollen der Schönheit die denen inne lebt, die in keine Schubladen passen.
Louise Rauhreif
November 2018
Fotografie von Christina Bulford
Wool Over the Eyes
Three Bags Full
by Jerome Chodorov, based on a farce by Claude Magnier
Q2 Players at the National Archives, Kew, until 24th November
Review by Didie Bucknall
Quite properly, we have had plenty of sober theatrical offerings lately due to the commemoration of the end of WW1, so it is a joy to be presented with a rip roaring farce energetically performed by the Q2 Players.
The venue is a new one for Q2. The massive National Archives building has a smallish comfortable performance space. The scenery has to be mobile for easy removal as the space needs to be used for other purposes. In this instance, it enhanced the atmosphere of the play; the mobile flats painted in elegant Art Deco style delicately formed the backdrop to an elaborate Hampstead Heath house.
Three Bags Full has nothing to do with sheep but plenty of wool surrounds the possibility of distinguishing the very different contents of three identical black holdall bags. The director’s notes liken the play to be somewhat in the vein of a Whitehall farce with larger-than-life characters pursuing perfectly plausible agendas, which seem completely reasonable to themselves but totally incomprehensible to each other. Chaos ensues as one might expect.
Farce needs to be played with balance and good timing, seemingly so easy, but in fact very difficult to achieve. The cast were more than equal to the task.
The action takes place 1925 in the luxurious home of Bascom Barlow the successful entrepreneurial owner of the sports firm of Barlows, played by Hugh Cox. His long serving clerk, Richard Foyle (Neelaksh Sadhoo) arrives in great excitement and out of control on roller skates. He has spent £300 of the firm’s money on ordering more pairs of skates. He thinks Barlow will be delighted at his initiative. Barlow is furious. Unbeknownst to Foyle, Barlow has been granted a bank loan and is getting into serious debt. But all is well, according to Foyle, for over the years he has been stashing away small sums of money taken from the firm so he can hand back a considerable sum to his boss. But there is a proviso, first Barlow must give Foyle permission for him to marry his daughter. Barlow is livid and dismisses him on the spot. But he needs the money. The money is divided into diamonds and cash, each contained in two identical black holdall bags. The seemingly curious attitude of the downstairs maid so jaunty with her feather duster, played by Judy Ramjeet, becomes clearer as it emerges that she is secretly engaged to a rich banker’s eligible son. She too has been dismissed and has packed her belongings in, yes, you’ve guessed it, an identical black holdall bag.
The plots muddle up. People are not who other people think they are. Lynne Harrison and Cat Lamin as mother and daughter, exotic in stunning period costumes, Dominic Upton as Boris the chauffeur a failed army recruit. At one stage he picks Foyle up and bodily throws him around. The unexpected arrival of Jeanette (Camilla Danson) and later, Charlotte Muir as her mother add to the confusion. The banker, Malcolm McAlister slipping on a discarded roller skate is put out of sorts and calls in his bank loan while his son, Paul Huggins drives his Aston Martin to and fro obligingly exchanging holdalls.
The laconic butler Jenkins (Christopher Hodges) trudging wearily back and forth to answer the front door engages the audience with a shrug as if to say, I know I am living in a mad house, but that’s all part of the job.
This is a very strong cast, well-rehearsed and well directed by Tony Cotterill. If this was his first attempt at directing, let us hope that it will not be his last. There are some good performances and it would be invidious to pick any one out, and this includes backstage staff as the lighting, sound, set construction and costumes were excellent. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
Didie Bucknall
November 2018
Photography by Rishi Rai Photography
Haunting, Harrowing, Horrifying
The Trial
by Stephen Berkoff, adapted from Franz Kafka
Youth Action Theatre at the Hampton Hill Theatre, until 24th November
Review by John O’Brien
Franz Kafka’s The Trial, written in 1925, is one of the most important literary works of the twentieth Century. Indeed Kafkaesque has entered the language as a byword for byzantine bureaucratic obfuscation and frustration. Youth Action Theatre is currently reviving Stephen Berkoff’s 1971 adaptation. Directed by Rowan D ‘Albert it is showing all this week at Hampton Hill Theatre.
The set is suitable minimalist. Think of a contestant on Mastermind as she sits in that chair in the dark, add eerie music by Philip Glass, and a rope that hangs menacingly from the gantry and you have some idea of the show’s visual and aural presentation. This chiaroscuro contrast gives the set the feel of a German expressionist classic, such as Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927).
Joseph K (Benjamin Buckley) is a young man who works as a clerk in a Bank and lives as a lodger in the house of Mrs Grubach (Ella Barnett). One morning he is arrested by two guards (Meagan Baxter and Joe Evans) on charges which are never made explicit. Joseph K. now enters a nightmarish Alice in Wonderland horror world of bureaucracy, law and unaccountable arbitrary power. The labyrinthine nature of this world is wonderfully realised by the use of six copper frames which do double duty as doors but also as mirrors. As he walks through and around these doors cum mirrors so Joseph becomes trapped in a series of absurd and menacing encounters. Famously this has become widely known through the notion of The Trial. But what’s very well demonstrated by this production is that The Trial is a metaphor for the whole of society as it impinges on the individual. One’s whole life is a trial so to speak. So we see Joseph being tormented by his landlady Mrs Grubach, his Father who recommends a terrible lawyer, Huld the Lawyer (Mary Rycroft), The Bank Manager (Cameron Christie), The Inspector (Josh Clarke), The Artist Titorelli (Josh Clarke), the Priest (Joe Evans) and various unpleasant women Miss Burstner (Georgia Griffiths) , Leni (Zofia Komoroska), the Laundress (Mary Rycroft) . All these different aspects of society, the law, finance, art, religion, the family, women are shown to confine, confuse and control Joseph in their own unique way. But what they all have in common is power. They symbolise the power of institutions over which Joseph has little if any control. He is a victim. Moreover he is alone. More than that the people he encounters are unreliable. So he becomes confused and paranoid.
What makes The Trial so haunting, so harrowing, so horrifying is the notion that you are on your own, the people you encounter have mendacious designs on you and that there is no way out. This is a deeply pessimistic and terrifying vision. But only fifteen years after he wrote it, the holocaust was under way and Kafka’s vision was all too real. It was happening. And in Germany the most civilised country in Europe, the home of Beethoven, Goethe and Einstein.
Walter Benjamin who committed suicide in 1940 as the Nazis closed in on him famously remarked that “every document of civilisation is simultaneously a document of barbarism”. The Trial is one of the most prescient, pessimistic and profound demonstrations of the truth of that aphorism. If you don’t know The Trial then this is a very good place to acquaint yourself with it. If you do then this intriguingly beguiling production will add fresh layers of meaning.
John O’Brien
November 2018
Photography courtesy of YAT
Joyful, Painful, Honest
Things I Know to Be True
by Andrew Bovell
Wild Duck Theatre at OSO Arts Centre, Barnes until 24th November
Review by Georgia Renwick
Has there, or can there ever be such a thing as a ‘normal’, quiet family life? Andrew Bovell’s 2016 Australian-British play tears right to the heart of the family unit in this suburban drama brought to life by the Wild Duck company, in searing, tear-jerking style.
The play opens with Rosie, the youngest of four children, returning with a broken heart from her gap-year travels in Europe. Mum, Fran, quickly assembles her brood of grown-up children to welcome her home, but before Dad, Bob, has even handed round the cups of tea, the bickering has already started and the excuses pour out. “Oh, I can’t stay…”, “Just popping in…”, “That’s my cue to go…”. One by one they return to their lives and Bob and Fran are left with just one little bird in her nest. It’s an incomplete family picture; where are the Sunday afternoon BBQs they imagined? The weddings? The grand-kids? They’ve raised their children to believe they could have anything they wanted, and now they’ve gone out and taken it, what happens when they’re left behind? The fractures only widen, the further away they get.
Set in the suburbs of Adelaide, Australia but conceived with the Adelaide State Theatre alongside Frantic Assembly, a British company renowned for their physical theatre work, Wild Duck has brought to the OSO stage a topical, relevant naturalistic drama peppered with sections of choreographed movement, devised by the company. As a young breakaway company themselves (Director Susan Conte has 6+ previous years’ experience directing) Wild Duck is deservedly garnering a reputation for presenting bold, intelligent, contemporary work. Having appeared at the Lyric, Hammersmith only this year, Things I Know to be True is hot off the press.
Bovell has crafted a play of such startling honesty it is by turns joyful and painfully uncomfortable watch; at once heart-achingly tender, and biting. The ongoing battle of generational difference is fought over the big stuff: gender roles, love, money and social class, comically punctuated with instantly recognisable family micro-dramas, such as where all that Tupperware gets to, or whether it’s high time your 24 year old son should be ironing his own shirts. Whether you are a parent yourself or not, you were once a child, and perhaps felt too the pressure on your generation to make things better than the last. If this play were set in a British back garden you can be sure Brexit would be on the cards, but nonetheless every generational obstacle they face in suburban Australia is relatable. There are multiple generations in the audience tonight, and where the laughs come from is telling!
The material plays to the strengths of Wild Duck, whose young talents, Ben Dimmock and and Berenike Kahane have both shone in recent Wild Duck productions The Distance and Picnic at Hanging Rock respectively. Kahane brings a sensitive fragility to Rosie, who at 18 is precariously balanced on the daunting cusp of adulthood. Dimmock lends a buoyant but frantic energy to early-20s son Ben, who is caught up in the flow of life by forces he soon finds are beyond his control.
As the threads of the family start to unravel towards crisis point at an alarming pace, by Act Two Bovell’s tightly wound structure begins to read like a series of worse case scenarios. It reaches a point where I feel it would be beyond the realms of possibility to expect anyone to cope, without at least a nervous breakdown, but the resilience of the Wild Duck cast to the demands of the material is a truly impressive achievement.
Dorothy Duffy’s Fran Price is a true matriarchal battle-axe. As a nurse, she frequently reminds us, she has seen it all before. Duffy’s fierceness does not ask for sympathy, and yet … Meanwhile, some challenging questions surrounding our expectations of ‘masculinity’ are raised by James Lloyd Pegg’s understated portrayal of Bob, her husband. His quietness speaks volumes.
The set design (Marc Pearce) and technical elements in this production also have a lot to say. A life-size bow of a tree sweeps over the top of the stage, unruly and untamed, and struck by the most deliciously warm and nostalgic light, the magical quality of light that captures the golden hour of a summer’s evening in a childhood memory. Borrell’s writing, enraptured by the cyclical nature of things, is also realised in the cool blues and crisp whites of the seasons as they pass. Exceptionally gorgeous work from lighting designer Katie Nicholl.
The physical theatre elements succeed in communicating a lot, without a word, set to the contemporary sounds of Joe Evans. Simple acts such as touching a hand, or buttoning up a shirt, are brought into clearer focus. How they connect in with the more naturalistic elements of the play, is left to our own imagining. They add another dimension, but visually do not linger in the mind as long as the emotions that surface.
No family looks exactly like we imagine. It is an organic thing shifting and changing and growing like the bow of the tree that sweeps across the stage. But if there’s one thing this family know to be true, there’s nowhere like the familiar chaos of family in a crisis.
Georgia Renwick
November 2018
Photography by Marc Pearce Photos
Spirit, Spiritually and Splash
The Queen Symphony and Symphony of Psalms
By Tolga Kashif and Igor Stravinsky
UK Premiere
Kew Wind Orchestra and Choirs at St John’s Smith Square, Westminster, 18th November
Review by Eugene Broad
“Let’s do it, darling” is supposedly what Freddie Mercury said, before downing a shot of vodka and singing the vocals to The Show Must Go On in a single recording, shortly before his death. That vim and vigour was harnessed wonderfully by the immensely talented performers of Kew Wind Orchestra, the Hampton Choral Society, and The Hythe Singers in Tolga Kashif’s The Queen Symphony.
Just as eclectic and individual as Freddie Mercury was the musical choice presented to us, with the other selected works being Percy Grainger’s A Marching Song of Democracy and Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
Grainger, as a composer and person, very much went his own way in life. This spirit was present throughout A Marching Song of Democracy, a lyrical series of waves building and washing over the listener, to the point of almost becoming blurry, before reorganising and rebuilding, with a central current of a theme pushing through the flotsam and jetsam around it. Intended to be performed to the rhythmic marching of feet as a chorus whistled and sung-along, the hypnotic drive of the piece came through without the need of this accompaniment.
Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms was almost painfully intense, given the power of the choir, the dexterity of the orchestra, and the atmosphere of St John Smith’s Square. A symphony split into three movements, each tackles a different Biblical psalm – 38, 39 and 150 respectively. Stravinsky was commissioned to compose the piece for $6,000 by Koussevitzky – his publisher, and the conductor of the Boston Symphony. This was supposedly somewhat a symbiotic relationship, with Koussevitzky loving Stravinsky’s music, and Stravinsky loving Koussevitzky’s money.
The first movement starts with a sudden jolt, a burst of E minor chords, which cascaded into a tempestuous piano (adroitly played throughout by Leo Nicholson), bass and cellos rumble, before bassoons circle in octatonic flight like hungry sea vultures waiting to swoop down and peck at the choir lamenting their fate. The effect is immediate – this has the desperation of drowning, deep in the ocean, in the midst of a storm. This is spiritual music designed to make the listener uncomfortably reflect on their mortality, as the choral voices plead with uncontrollable forces to “be no more”.
Compared to this movement (and likewise the third movement), the second movement is almost pedestrian by comparison. Evoking an uneasy Bach, the second movement begins with orchestral exposition, wonderfully morose oboes picking out a fugue, later joined by fluttery soft flutes and stronger-winged piccolos – reminiscent, perhaps, of the hungry sea vultures now being content, stomachs full of drowned choir, calling to each other on a becalmed sea. Kew Wind Orchestra handled this part especially marvellously, with the orchestra answering and calling to each-other, until the choir re-emerges from the morning stillness – slowly building and structuring their own answers and calls to their counterparts. This dialogue was excellently controlled and maintained by orchestra and choirs alike. This gentleness lulls into a false sense of security; all at once, the choir bursts into life again.
The third, final movement, is almost a mix of the two which come before it. It has a heavy tension within it, echoing the contrapuntal nature of the second movement. Mixed in is the same visceral force of nature which is so dominant in the first movement. Increasingly gentle cries of “hallelujah”, accompanied by the soft heaving breathing of the woodwind orchestra; no longer a fierce organ-beast, but its own voice distinct again. Adeptly handled by both orchestra and choir, this was evocative spiritual contemplation of a type that only someone from the fold of Russian Orthodoxy could produce, much like Rachmaninov’s far more traditionalist Vespers. The surprising difference between the two, however, is that Stravinsky infamously refused to endorse that music creates feeling. This particular work – not to mention a dozen others – begs to differ.
But the absolute highlight of the evening had to be Kashif’s The Queen Symphony, at which point the conductor, Matthew Willis, Kew Wind Orchestra, Hampton Choral Society, and the Hythe Singers clearly shared “one vision”. The symphony, split into six movements arranged by mood, drew from the feel and inspiration of Queen’s songs. Even so, clear motifs, patterns, and themes were recognisable as Queen’s – solely adding to the appeal and fun of the piece in listening and finding their famous riffs and rhythms echoed or masked in orchestral form.
Perhaps best considered (very) literally as a popular classical piece, it was never fully pop nor fully classical. Rather, it was an absolute “Bohemian rhapsody” (or well, rather, symphony) – with the motif of Who Wants to Live Forever re-emerging through it to add consistency and flavour. Despite being composed with Queen in mind, it could hold its own as a stand-alone symphony which even someone without a soft spot for Queen would comfortably enjoy.
Whilst all three of the soloists were superlative in their performances (with Rachel Barnes on violin, Gillian O’Dempsey on ‘cello, and Leo Nicholson on piano), the orchestra and choirs, marvellously marshalled by Matthew Willis were “the champions” of the night. I truly hope that this particular piece is one kept close for frequent future recitals, and it is equally one to keep a keen eye out for – it’ll rock you, make you gaga and want the show to keep going on.
Eugene Broad
November 2018
Photographs courtesy of Kew Wind Orchestra
Twisted Icon of an Entire Era
/ Sylvia \
by Ja?, adapted from a play by Stéphane Ghislain Roussel
Ja? Theatre Company at The Etcetera Theatre until 18th November
Voila Europe Festival
Review by Lola McKeith
The resemblance is striking. You enter the space and there it is: the cropped hair, the monocle, the shapeless plaid dress with the high collar repressing all notions of femininity, the champagne flute, the carefully arranged cigarette case, but most of all the uncanny angular pose, the pointy shoulders, interlocked legs, the twisted torso and peculiarly placed hands all artfully arranged in their awkwardness. The Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia Von Harden by Otto Dix, if not as shocking as in 1926 then arguably still as intriguing, is one of the most instantly recognisable images of the twentieth century because it did, exactly as intended by the artist, come to represent an entire era.
Dix was a German painter well-known for his brutal portrayal of debauched dilapidated Weimar society, all whores and cripples, murderers, beggars, street urchins, cabaret dancers and circus freaks, ghoulish and grotesque, often exaggerated in their ugliness to resemble comic-book-like caricatures. Legend has it that he spotted Sylvia, a fixed member of the intellectual glitterati in 1920s Berlin, at the Romanisches Café and exclaimed: “I have to paint you!” He saw in her the personification of the New Woman, the boyish, flapper dressed, bob-haired new ideal of modernity. Sylvia agreed to sit for him, an hour every day for weeks on end, a process she found tiresome and which resulted in a painting she thought “strange” at first but grew to be immensely proud of, posing next to it in old age at the Centre Pompidou.
We meet Sylvia as she sits for the painter, twitching, bored, unable to switch off her never resting inquisitive mind. She shares her trail of thoughts with us, the audience, standing in for the painter, observing her, “scrutinizing” her body, her features, her clothes. Sylvia isn’t entirely comfortable being watched like this, it seems, but defiantly pushes on and something about the attention seems to flatter her.
Performer Joseph Morgen Schofield, who uses pronouns they or them, is an utterly charming Sylvia, witty, observant, gossipy, pensive, with a commanding stage presence most notable in the long silences deliciously savoured to the last almost unbearable second. Where Dix saw in von Harden a question about femininity and the binary expectations enforced on women, Monocle, Portrait de S. von Harden by the Luxembourgish artist Stéphane Ghislain Roussel written for a non-binary performer explores modern day notions of gender fluidity and gender performance. In its translation from French and German into English, Ja? Theatre Company aims to give the figure of Sylvia a more international, universal appeal, still peppering her monologue with the odd French expression or German remark. A white screen as background serves both to frame the little scene and open up a multimedia window into the future where a modern day Sylvia (Caroline Tyka) explores her own nowadays urban environment. While initially the videos of city lights and noise add a layer of restless urban atmosphere, as Sylvia tells us of the “sequined nights” of Weimar Berlin, it is not entirely clear what the second actor, interrupting with shorter and shorter snippets of German text, adds to the play. Maybe it’s to disrupt the feeling of nostalgia that easily spreads when Schofield sings, with the breaking, fragile voice of a Cabaret diseuse, a song about Berlin to the crackling playback of an old shellac record. A moment of magic is promptly broken by a self-deprecating remark, Sylvia’s readiness to laugh at herself first before anyone else can.
The fragility of the supposedly “ugly” or unconventional woman is painfully obvious, in the way she longingly describes the opulent flesh of the cabaret dancer Martha or the luscious red curls of Anita Berber, another era-defining woman whose beauty apparently turned men into poets. Would Felix, her current beau, kill herself for her, as a suitor did for Martha? Would she herself become a vision of Berber-esque red curls and beauty at the hands of Otto Dix? What we witness most of all is a fiercely intelligent woman who in the face of physical attention longs to be sensual, desirable, even a bit ditzy, imitating the reckless, devil-may-care glamour of a Sally Bowles. Vices were the epitome of chic in Weimar Germany and the chain-smoking Sylvia is as fascinated by gossip, tabloid scandal, lose morals and raunchiness as the entire era. It’s all a pose though. A performance. It’s a type that represented the era, not any one person, the New Woman is a construct as hollow as the plaid dress that is left on the chair like the shell of a ghost.
It’s an interesting hour spend in the company of the immensely watchable Joseph Morgen Schonfield. While Otto Dix was notorious for his merciless, flaw enhancing “evil eye”, /Sylvia\ celebrates with empathy and kindness the beauty of not quite fitting in.
Lola McKeith
November 2018
Photography by Christina Bulford
Half the Seed of Europe
War Requiem
by Benjamin Britten
English National Opera, London Coliseum until 7th December
Review by Mark Aspen
Last summer, when staying a few days in Alsace, that most Germanic part of France, I visited the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. Although it was quite quiet in the museum, there was, as always, a small crowd around its crowning glory, Mathis Grünewald’s moving masterpiece, the Isenheim Altar. Benjamin Britten suggested this as an illustration of his War Requiem at its first performance at the consecration of the re-built Coventry Cathedral, destroyed early in the Second World War. Four and a half centuries separate their creation, but what they have in common is sacrifice. Britten’s 1962 monumental work speaks of the sacrifice, in the First World War, of “half the seed of Europe”; whereas the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of all mankind is the subject of Grünewald’s vivid depiction of suffering in his 1512 altarpiece, with Christ’s body on the Cross twisted in agony.
Britten is a composer greatly associated with the English National Opera, so it is fitting that the first fully-staged UK performance of his War Requiem should be presented by ENO, a company acclaimed for staging oratorio and similar works, most notably Deborah Warner’s Messiah nearly a decade ago. The scale is similar, the incomparable ENO chorus being augmented by the contrasting style of the ensemble from ENO’s recent Porgy and Bess and further complemented by forty members of the Finchley Children’s Music Group. Equally a chamber orchestra extends the full force of ENO’s orchestra.
A self-proclaimed pacifist, Britten absconded to the United States just before the beginning of the Second World War, as an “artistic ambassador”, only returning towards the end of hostilities to apply for exemption from military services as a conscientious objector. Consequently, some found it distasteful that he should write a requiem for the war dead; however, his requiem is cast wider to encompass all who suffer in war. The larger part of the requiem is given over to grief formal and anguish informal of non-combatants, represented by one soprano soloist, but with the full weight of the choruses. The emphasis is not on the glory of war, but on the pity of war.
The universality of total war (a term coined by General Ludendorff in his First World War memoires) is embodied in War Requiem by the juxtaposition of two disparate texts, the Latin Missa pro Defunctis (Mass for the Dead) with Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. The Missa reflects on the spiritual and emotional losses in war, against Owen’s articulations of the physical and psychological damage. The human level of the war poetry is expressed by two men soloists, accompanied largely by the chamber orchestra. This contrasts with the mass, in all senses, of the Missa where the monumental momentum of the chorus, ensemble and full orchestra, accentuated by the soprano solo, proclaims an overawing magnificence. Yet there is an estranged ethereal presence of the voices of the children singers, with their own suppliant musical accompaniment. Hence War Requiem runs on three levels concurrently, as it contrasts the sublime with the horrific.
Horror is the starting theme for the stage set, which features huge photographs from the post-First World War shock-tactic album of conscientious objector Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Krieges, including inter alia pictures of the badly mutilated faces of injured soldiers. However, one is left wondering whether the images of naked torn bodies of the battlefield to illustrate the opening chorous, “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine”, disrespectfully disturbs eternal rest that the Lord is asked to grant.
The designer, German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, is one of today’s best-known artists in the photographic field, having the distinction of being both the first foreign winner of the Turner Prize, and the first photographer to do so. War Requiem is his debut in operatic design. He has eschewed a three-dimensional set, to a photographic design, which indeed plays to his strengths by creating an installation. Enhanced by Charles Balfour’s lighting, the diverse images used include riots, Coventry Cathedral, mosses, wind-torn tree limbs and slaughtered sheep. Eventually however, they becoming increasingly lyrical with brilliant flowers, awe-inspiring cloudscapes and snow. They are projected onto the cyclorama, or interspersed flats, or in one case across the whole front of the auditorium, filling the theatre with purple light and bold images of blue pulsatilla anemones. A fly-drop of concrete rubble transmogrifies from an inverted mushroom-cloud into a beautiful falling snowscape, but the one nod to a three-dimensional set is baffling, something resembling a gigantic ginger root that the children climb over.
How do you go about staging an oratorio? This is the controversial question that the director, ENO’s own Daniel Kramer, seeks to again answer in this production. There is a need for balance in trying to enhance the work rather than distract from it. Tillmans’ grand images are magnificent, and the disturbing ones harrowing, but there is a danger that these do sometimes steer away from what the music is trying to say.
Much of the visual imagery is created by the swirling crowds of humanity on stage. The three choruses are there most of the time and are supplemented by eight child actors from the Sylvia Young Theatre School. They are constantly in motion, always abject, sombre, cowed. Sometimes the movements are militaristic, sometimes like prisoners, sometimes like mourners. All the costumes are variants of muted grey-blues. In one vignette, the circling lines of bodies are reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s 1890 painting, Prisoners Exercising, although often the tableaux seem removed from the words. Ann Yee’s chorography is exemplary in keeping all the fluency in the movement. There are poignant episodes. In the Offertorium, Owen inverts the episode in Genesis when Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, in that no angel comes to substitute the ram: “ but the old man would not so, but slew his son, – and half the seed of Europe, one by one”.
Britten’s music underlines the ironies of the often contradictory nature of the conflicting words of Owen’s war poetry and the Missa, with sudden turns from the soaringly lyrical to the edgily dissonant. The score makes a wide use of tritone, the interval that early music theorists called Diabolous in Musica, the devil in the music, to jar the listener and to point up the themes of conflict versus resolution, or reality versus glorification. Conductor, Martyn Brabbins specialises in twentieth century music and it shows in his magnificent interpretation of the power and intricacies of War Requiem and the control and co-ordination of his varied array of musicians and singers.
Emma Bell brings a strong and expressive voice to the soprano solo, a soul lost in the sea of humanity, hair shock stiff. Is she a grieving mother, a protective matron or an angel of death? All are amalgamated in her words and body language. Her “lacrimosa dies illa” (this day full of tears) has beauty, pathos and richness. The two men soloists are the combatants, the tenor one of “our boys”, the baritone, the enemy soldier, although the distinction blurs as the piece goes on. David Butt Philip, the tenor, brings full-on power to a soaring expression of the sentiment of the piece. Award-winning baritone, Roderick Williams’ rich and gentle approach is full of empathy and pathos. In the resolving moment of the requiem, the two are together. As the tenor sings “It seems that out of battle I escaped”, we realise it is in death that opposing soldiers meet with honour. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”, the baritone replies in recognition, in a moment of heart-wrenching anguish.
There is a quote in the Agnus Dei from Owen’s At a Calvary near the Ancre, in which soldiers pass at a crossroads a damaged monument to the crucified Christ, and there is a recognition their hearts. The poem is dense with symbolism, which was not picked up in Kramer’s symbol-laden War Requiem, but it piercingly summarises the message of the piece as a whole, “But they who love the greater love lay down their life; they do not hate”.
Let us not pass by.
Mark Aspen
November 2018
