Linbury Studio Theatre
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Gwion Thomas and Sally Silver as Eddy's parents
Images: Clive Barda |
Eddy – Alastair Shelton-Smith/Michael
McCarthy
Eddy’s Mum/Waitress/Sphinx –
Sally Silver
Eddy’s Sister/Waitress who
becomes Eddy’s Wife/Sphinx – Louise Winter
Eddy’s Dad/Café Manager/Chief
of Police – Gwion Thomas
Michael McCarthy (director)
Simon Banham (designs)
Ace McCarron, Jon Turtle
(lighting)
The Music Theatre Wales
Ensemble
Michael Rafferty (conductor)
After the bitter
disappointment of Anna Nicole, came
this reminder – both sad and hopeful– that Mark-Anthony Turnage was once
capable of writing urgent, exciting music theatre. Indeed, from this composer I
have heard nothing finer, perhaps nothing to match, this, his first opera, to
Steven Berkoff’s libretto after his own Oedipal play, Greek. Adverse circumstances notwithstanding, this performance and
production from Music Theatre Wales offered everything one could reasonably
hope for, and more. Marcus Farnsworth, who had been ailing on the first night,
had awoken with no voice, to be replaced by an heroic combination of the
flown-in-from-Berlin-that-afternoon Alastair Shelton-Smith to sing the part on
stage and Michael McCarthy to act, to mime the sung passages, and to deliver the
spoken text. If anything, the practice added to the feeling of alienation,
social and theatrical, but it would have come to nothing without such committed
performances. From the word go, or rather a somewhat bluer word than that, when
McCarthy hastened toward the stage, scarily impersonating an irate member of
the audience hurling abuse at the audience, he inhabited the role visually and
gesturally. His own production frames the performance convincingly, offering a
return into the audience as Eddy is rejected by his family, those who
supposedly love him unable to stomach his desire to ‘climb back inside my mum’.
Shelton-Smith’s assuredly protean yet deeply felt vocal performance fully
deserved the rapturous reception it received from audience and fellow
cast-members alike, and would have done so even if it had not been for the
particular circumstances.
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| Sally Silver and Louise Winter as the Sphinx |
But the other performances
were equally assured. Sally Silver and Louise Winter proved as versatile in
vocal as in acting terms, their combination as lesbian separatist sphinx being
sleazy and savagely humorous in equal measure. Gwion Thomas was just as impressive in the
other male roles, the sad would-be patriarch as much as the brutal police
chief. The Music Theatre Wales Ensemble under Michael Rafferty played Turnage’s
score as to the manner born: angry and soulful, biting and tender, urgent and yet
offering oases for reflection. Whether called upon to play in conventional
terms, to shout, to stamp, or even to strike a pose, there could be no
gainsaying the level of artistry on offer from players and conductor alike.
McCarthy’s production places
the work firmly in the tradition of music theatre – doubtless partly out of
necessity, but, unlike in the opera, virtue certainly arises out of fate. Props
are minimal but used to full effect, the cast in proper post-Brechtian fashion undertaking
the stage business too. Video projections of key words, not least Berkoff’s inevitable
‘Motherfucker’, heightens both drama and alienation. But perhaps the principal
virtue is that of allowing the anger of Berkoff and Turnage’s drama to unfold,
within an intelligent yet far from attention-seeking frame. The transposition
of the Oedipus myth to 1980s London now seems both of its time and yet relevant
to ours. It works as a far more daring version of the original EastEnders might have done, yet with
injection of magic realism. Both Berkoff’s ear for language – the ability to
forge a stylised ‘vernacular’, which yet can occasionally shift into knowingly would-be
Shakespearean poetry – and Turnage’s response and intensification, whether his
pounding protest rhythms or the jazzy seduction of his beloved saxophone, work just as
McCarthy’s staging does: they grip and yet they will also, if not always, distance.
Above all, one continues to feel and indeed to reiterate the anger felt by
outcasts in the brutal Britain of Margaret Thatcher. Incest offers not only its
own story, but stands or can come to stand also for other forms of social and
sexual exclusion. Hearing of the plague, one can think of it as Thatcherism and
the ignorant, hypocritical right-wing populism that continues to infest
political discourse, or one can turn it round and view it as the guardians of
morality most certainly would have done at the time of the 1988 premiere, as
the fruits of sexual ‘deviance’: the tragedy of HIV/AIDS.
That space to think, to
interpret is not the least of the work’s virtues, fully realised in
performance. Its musical lineage is distinguished; on this occasion, those
coming to mind included Stravinsky, Andriessen, magical shards of Knussen, and,
alongside the music theatre of the Manchester School, that of Henze too,
especially the angry social protest of Natascha
Ungeheuer. But it is its own work, now with its own performance tradition,
of which Music Theatre Wales’s contribution is heartily to be welcomed.
