The Coronation of Poppea

English Touring Opera

28 September 2013

The final duet, sung by Marie-Nicole Lemieux and Philippe Jaroussky.

Would you believe these characters are psychopaths? From here.

A triumph, focussing on the serious side of this masterpiece.

ETO's current season is a superb idea: three operas from the period, let's say 1640-1720, when Venice was the centre of the newly-created artform.

Among the three, the earliest composed is not only the greatest opera before Gluck's mature period from the 1760s, but one of the greatest of all dramas, and I think the only opera to genuinely compare with Shakespeare's works in style and power.

Even Shakespeare might have found this difficult: low comedy, high tragedy and a final celebration of the immorality of love. The love between Nerone and Poppea does not transcend good and evil, but is shown directly to be evil, though it is also shown to be so much more vivid, more alive, than anything else.

Seneca's death scene is extremely moving: the composer cannot be accused of stacking the odds against him. But it is ineffectual, as is any other effort, against the overwhelming passion of the central lovers.

The opera starts with the god of love asserting he will dominate the goddesses of virtue and fortune, but in fact only Nerone's love triumphs; Ottone's fails, for example. So while love is important, power is shown to be at least as important, though part of this work's own enduring power arises from the way love and power are not contrasted, but linked.

Setting this masterpiece in Stalin’s Russia works extremely well, though it seems to have encouraged director James Conway to excessively telegraph the eventual brutal fate of Poppea, caused by her lover’s rage.

It’s understandable: Stalin has always seemed more brute than libertine, regardless of his early poetic pretensions. Throughout it is clear that Poppea’s power hungriness blinds her to Nerone’s dangerously idealised and self-centred form of love; during the ravishing final duet she finally seems to understand, too late.

I felt this was a mistake, undermining the music which makes it clear these two genuinely love each other, at least for now. But it's an illuminating mistake, not seriously harmful.

I also regretted the cutting of the 'low' comedy, but perhaps I would have found a full performance more trying, so the losses are not grievous.

Monteverdi benefits from being given in English: his flexible recitative, into which almost the entire work is cast, is much harder to appreciate in surtitles. This version by Anne Ridler, amended by Conway, seemed to fit the music perfectly and convey the composer's word setting.

Paula Sides is a sexy Poppea, even in a terrible blond wig (why was that?) and Helen Sherman was a terrifying Nerone. Importantly their voices blended well in the final duet.

The standout performance though was Piotr Lempa's grave and dignified Seneca, in a role that can easily become parody (the music perhaps facilitates this). It is vital that Seneca's death be genuinely tragic, as here is a sane man who is willing to stand up even to Nerone, despite his fear. Yet in the end, he accepts death rather than struggle to overthrow evil, and this resignation permits evil to triumph.

The Britten theatre at the Royal College of Music is ideally sized for this work, and the orchestra produced a full sound despite being often reduced to one or two instruments.

Recording Hedda

New Diorama theatre

28 September 2013

The finale of Diana Rigg's performance of the central role. From here.

The core of Hedda Gabler survives this misguided ironic updating, though it would help if you know the original.

I don’t understand what special value was gained by this production’s reworking of Ibsen. A group of actors and writers are doing a radio recording of Hedda Gabler, though here it is claimed to be a new piece by one of the characters, Tansman.

He’s also hoping to stage the work, as a vehicle for his wife, G, the central character. He wants to stage it in an avant-garde theatre called the Black Box – the New Diorama stage here is basically a darkened box. So far, so self-referential.

The radio version quickly takes second place to the drama enacted behind-the-scenes, which turns out to be a fairly faithful updating of Ibsen, ‘vine leaves in his hair’ and all.

Towards the climax, the radio play and the ‘real life’ play merge imperceptibly. It’s all very postmodern, but in the worst sense of adding nothing and subtracting rather a lot.

If the original is wrongly felt to be melodramatic, then things are made much worse here, depicting actors in their studio. If Ibsen’s dialogue is wooden, this was no less wooden. The audience wonders whether these people overacting on purpose, because that is what they always do?

The updating makes some of Ibsen’s plot devices implausible – surely Tansman would text Løvborg to tell him he found his precious manuscript?

These anachronisms are jarring, but worse is the reduction of all the characters to drama professionals. Perhaps the bored daughter of a general would become an actress, though this surely requires more dedication than Hedda grants herself.

But reducing Judge Brack to an actor is disastrous – this monument to cynicism, dead inside as Hedda observes, loses much sense when he isn’t also a pillar of society.

If anything of Ibsen survives, it is at least the strongest part. Hedda is fascinating and absorbing, even here, where Sarah Head spends too much time searching the middle distance with her eyes.

Actually most of the actors do this, and it’s a sign the director hasn’t helped them understand their character – at one point G confesses she hasn’t grasped Tansman’s play… another painful self-referential moment, for I would suggest these actors didn’t grasp it fully either.

Still, for all that Hedda fascinates. This production doesn’t – cannot – make her any sort of a victim. Clearly she could divorce Tansman, or abort her unwanted pregnancy, options not easily open to Ibsen’s original. Even Brack’s blackmail carries little conviction here.

It’s possible to present Hedda as a victim, or as a monster, or bits of both. Here she is clearly a monster, though both charismatic and understandable, so that we cannot easily be appalled by her actions.

In this, the drama faithfully reflects an important aspect of Ibsen’s magnificent creation.

Ghosts

Almeida theatre

27 September 2013

A trailer inspired by paintings by Vilhelm Hammershøi. 

Not really relevant to the the drama, but evocative.

A devastating analysis of family life, in the greatest production it is likely to receive.

This was one of the most harrowing experiences I have had in a theatre, a triumphant vindication both of Ibsen’s most affecting tragedy and of director Richard Eyre’s traditional approach.

I must admit that when I first saw the set, I feared this might turn out to be the kind of comfortable experience in the theatre that people in Ibsen’s own time expected, and which really hasn’t changed since.

But Eyre’s direction is so assured that Ibsen’s unfolding plot reduced me to an emotional wreck within the first few minutes. Thankfully both Ibsen and Eyre lighten the tone a little, providing enough breathing space that the tragic climax is almost unbearable when it comes.

Lesley Manville’s central performance of Helene Alving was astonishing. She appeared near sobbing at the curtain calls, and applauding seemed in bad taste – it really was as if we had just seen her kill her only son, and only remaining lifeline.

It wouldn’t have worked so well if the rest of the cast were any less impressive. Will Keen’s Pastor Manders in particular seemed close to apoplexy throughout, as Helene revealed the full situation, her misery and the terrible consequences of what he felt was the greatest struggle of his life in rejecting her.

In a production as good as this, the full impact of Ibsen’s dissection of our families could be realised, even though Eyre blended acts to permit the whole thing to be played without interval.

The most important of Ibsen’s revelations was given full significance. Helene realises that she played a role in making her husband unhappy; that both were trapped in a situation neither could control. The misery of the moment is almost unendurable but in fact we have to endure worse shortly afterwards.

What distinguishes this from other miserable dramas, what elevates it to tragedy, is Helen’s gradual self-realisation, and hence the tragic grandeur she achieves when she understands she must kill her son.

Everyone else, while important and well constructed characters, are important mostly because of the way they help Helene – and us – come to her understandings.

Everyone should see this production. And we should all be grateful for Manville in giving us this unique and terrible experience.

Fabricate

Leyden gallery, London

25 September – 18 October 2013

Penelope, by Becky Allen.

Mildly political artworks reflecting the social and economic history of Spitalfields.

Passing through the City proper to reach neighbouring Spitalfields is as strange an experience as it must always have been. Thronged streets of suited men and women, giving the impression that they want to make an impression, give way to informal markets and cafes peopled more leisurely.

The Leyden gallery is situated between the financial centre and the old garment district, which is still in use as a clothing market area, though I doubt many of the suits from the former are made now in the latter.

Fabricate is one of the current exhibitions at the Leyden. The other, a collection of treated flower / leaf photographic prints by Alexander Hamilton is more commercial, perhaps intended to attract a purchaser from the city who is idly passing on their lunch break.

The larger exhibition is more ambitious, more thought-provoking, and involves more artists. Perhaps it is also weaker artistically, being more of a work-in-progress as the gallery curators style it.

This is art about textiles, rather than textiles as art, though Zhenhan Hao appears to have a couple of ‘collectible’ items of handmade clothing on display.

Principally the artists are making political or social comments about clothing. My favourite work here is Hao’s Portrait with Apple, which would surely have pleased Magritte, whose style it copies. This is an ironic comment on China’s ability to manufacture goods, including iphones, based upon designs found elsewhere. And the painting itself is a product someone has bought, based on a Belgian design.

If that were the whole of it, it would be merely a decent joke, but thankfully Magritte is a good painter to copy, and the work is striking.

Sue Clayton’s series of photographs, supposedly depicting a white Victorian seamstress returned to dwell amongst current Spitalfields residents, is both more ambitious and more problematic.

The images celebrate the diversity of Spitalfields, while retaining the sense that these are still poor people making their living from textiles. Whether this accurately reflects economic reality in this gentrified area, I don’t know, but large parts of the East End no longer suggest nineteenth century urban poverty.

The seamstress is unsmiling: is she unhappy with the changes? Or with how little, in the end, has actually changed? Is it misleading to depict a white woman as the Victorian resident exemplar, given the racial diversity that the area has had since reformation times?

The other artists in this show, Hilary Ellis and Becky Allen, have produced abstract responses conveying something of the texture and mystery of fabrics. They nicely complement the narrative work of the first two artists.

Roméo et Juliette

Royal Festival Hall

26 September 2013

The great love scene under Salonen, this time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in 2007. 

From here.

Beautiful playing from the Philharmonia misses some of the work's passion in favour of establishing symphonic credentials.

Although you can see why Berlioz called this masterpiece – one of music's pinnacles – a dramatic symphony, it’s a misleading and indeed oxymoronic title: a symphony is already a form of drama in music.

It is because he took things rather further, and linked his work closely to Shakespeare’s drama, adding arias and choruses, but although I feel this is an important attempt to ‘realise’ Shakespeare’s tragedy in music, that isn’t the central achievement here. This is firstly a symphony, albeit a strange one.

For one thing, the work doesn’t end in tragedy, but rather in reconciliation and hope, more related to Beethoven’s ninth than anything in Shakespeare (except The Tempest). Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen was especially good here, expertly pacing the final movement’s transition from conflict to peace, itself reminiscent of the last few minutes of the ninth.

The finale is less important than in other major post-Beethoven symphonies because its composer sidesteps the problem of how to craft a finale that will sounds effective after a profoundly searching slow or tragic movement.

Berlioz’ slow movements are an ecstatic love scene and a Gluck-inspired funereal chorus, both extremely moving though the love music carries off the palm by virtue of being some of the most beautiful music we have (as Toscanini claimed).

The last movement instead contrasts with and follows the jarring, forceful music of the movement titled ‘Romeo at the Capulet’s tomb’. Salonen’s pacing and dynamics were excellent in both of these tricky movements.

Berlioz isn't self-evidently successful in creating a symphony out of these disparate movements, though the sense of being jolted around is much less prevalent here than in his other characteristic works, and there is less of the sense of frantically running without moving.

I have some sympathy with those critics, starting with Wagner, who adore parts but find the whole tiring. This may be because the aria-and-chorus concerted bookends can seem problematic. The first movement is described as a prologue even by champions like David Cairns, and the symphony does seem to be launched twice. The ending, as described above, counterbalances sudden and shuddering violent death rather than overwhelming grief, which comes earlier and is in any case classically restrained.

So it’s to Salonen’s credit that he imparts full gravity to these outer movements and makes them work.

It is a pity his approach was less successful elsewhere. Partly this was due to lack of ferocity or crudeness, common among conductors wanting to place Berlioz within the pantheon of sober symphonists. Partly it was also due to insufficient romance, either in the first movement or more seriously in the love scene.

But this is actually a small quibble. Is a more magical experience possible than when the offstage voices fade away and the love scene properly starts? And wasn’t Toscanini right? This is the kind of experience that transforms the way we feel, at least for some decent time afterwards.

An Enemy of the People

Albany theatre, Deptford

25 September 2013

One of the most unlikely attempts at Stockmann's great anti-people speech, from Steve McQueen. 

Community pettiness and NGO arrogance equally lampooned in this updated production... almost.

Rebecca Manson Jones’ loose adaptation of Ibsen’s drama retains the spirit rather than the letter of the original, except in the final scene. She sensibly suggests this supposed comedy could be better called ‘the do-gooder’ in English.

The upright Dr Stockmann is here a former NGO campaigner, bringing ethically sourced palm oil to a Cornish village. The up-to-the-minute text, larded with references to tweeting and crowd sourcing, requires some barely plausible contortions to remain close to the original – the Stockmann siblings want to create a rival to Brighton in Cornwall, the local newspaper becomes a symbol of the end of the print age, and so on.

This updating doesn’t significantly alter the work, though I’m not sure Sarah Malin’s convincingly professional campaigner, working late on a media release, would genuinely encounter a ‘lightbulb moment’ in the great community hall speech scene.

If there is humour in this comedy, it is bitter, and at the expense of the idealistic Stockmann, whose family suffer as a consequence of his (in this case her) stand for the future, which achieves nothing in the present and indeed climaxes in a shocking denunciation of the rest of us.

Though right, at least in the beginning, during her great anti-democratic speech she sets herself against almost everyone, rather as Brand did in an earlier drama, and an audience that is paying attention should certainly question its sympathy with her.

This production brilliantly recreated the atmosphere of a community meeting, and asked the audience to vote on whether Stockmann was indeed a public enemy.

The majority sided with her, which is itself quite disturbing. Presumably we voted for her earlier self, the one Ibsen and Manson Jones succeed in making sympathetic, heroic. But are we really agreeing with her that we are upsided cockroaches with our legs twitching?

Ibsen surely knew better when he had his community reject Stockmann. Here, the final scene was a skilful piece of montage conveying an overall sense of hope. Only here did the adaptation differ from Ibsen in spirit, and I think for the worse. His version, with Stockmann confident but ruined, is more challenging.

Unlike many other great dramatists, Ibsen’s endings are important, for he drives us towards them with all the mechanical skill of the nineteenth century well-made play. So changing the tone of his endings is a serious mutilation; nor was the risk one worth taking here.

Aside from this limitation, everything else in this production worked wonderfully well. The Stockmann family was presented so naturalistically I thought the actors must be related. Elizabeth Elvin, in the role of the representative of the town’s small businesses, stole every scene she was in, but every cast member seemed to embody their role.

If only his ending could be preserved, I can’t imagine a better updating of Ibsen’s work: this should be seen.

In the Jungle of Cities

Arcola theatre

24 September 2013

A trailer that tells you absolutely nothing about the work. From here.

Unfamiliar uncompromising early Brecht that deserves more performances, on the strength of this production. But it could be clearer.

A self-consciously difficult drama from the young Brecht, this sequence of scenes is made even less easy to understand through some of the choices of director Peter Sturm.

It is not easy to follow the various choices and outcomes in this non-naturalistic and existential fight between the rich Schlink and the poor Garga, whom the weary Schlink appears to select as a challenge, given the young man’s strong sense of dignity and self-worth.

In the programme Sturm claims his version is a psychodrama, with the events taking place in Garga’s imagination, but that isn’t clear from this production, nor, I think, would such a conception do justice to the author.

Brecht was aiming for a poetic depiction of cities, and ended up with whores and gangsters, families tearing themselves apart due to poverty and other premonitions of the Threepenny Opera, though the vein of black humour in the later work is missing here.

He is fascinated by our capacity to endure beyond what our sense of dignity or self-respect allows. The grotesques are taken from the expressionist zoo, and he shares the expressionist interest in degradation, but doesn’t delight in it. Brutally unsentimental, it is still certain that he disapproves, and wants us to share this disapproval. A political theory would later be developed to provide justification, but this early works shows that he always felt it, whatever he thought about (other?) bourgeois morality.

Another aspect of the playwright is apparent in this production, perhaps one he would also vigorously deny: an attraction to imaginative, forceful characters.

Schlick, the Malay who starts the fight, is undeniably sympathetic, at least as embodied here by Jeffery Kissoon. He rises to romantic heights during his suicide, and has already won our admiration for his strange courage in destroying his own financial security in order to challenge Garga’s sense of self-worth.

Of the two, Schlick seems the most understandable, despite his peculiar risk-taking. I suspect Brecht intended him to seem more inscrutable, in a racist way, but that wouldn’t work now so Sturm and Kissoon open him to us. Though rarely dignified in a conventional sense, he is never wretched, suggesting that  irreducible dignity is found elsewhere.

Schlick, then, contradicts a view that poverty is incompatible with dignity, though the dignity that can be kept in poverty is not our usual sense of it but something deeper. I suspect Brecht would object to this view, and undoubtedly it is problematic, but it keeps this dramas alive.

In contrast, Garga is confusing, probably only worsened in this production, which has him peculiarly dragged up after he has become rich, to suggest links with his equally degraded ex-lover Jane.

But it would also be possible to see Garga, who after all is the central character, as a poetic description of the compromises that someone in the city must make in order to survive, much less thrive, though his thriving has little to do with his own efforts and more to do with random chance. It isn’t surprising that the character is confused and confusing, and Joseph Arkley conveys this in a very physical performance.

The three women actors deserve special credit for turning Brecht’s one dimensional proto-whores into living creations.

And the Arcola deserves credit for tackling this intriguing, maddening work.