Britten Theatre
Susan Wheeler – Lauren Joyanne
Morris
Ella Foley – Beth Moxon
Stephen Foley – Thomas Erlank
Ben Pascoe – Theodor Platt
Sandy, Officer 1 – Richard Pinkstone
Blazes, Officer 2 – James Atkinson
Arthur, Voices of the Cards,
Officer 3 – Timothy Edlin
Stephen Unwin (director)
Hannah Wolfe (designs)
Ralph Stokeld (lighting)
Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra
Michael Rosewell (conductor)
It was, on paper and not only
on paper, an excellent idea to pair Huw Watkins’s 2012 chamber opera, In the Locked Room, with Peter Maxwell
Davies’s classic drama, The Lighthouse.
In both works, it is – or should be – far from clear where the boundaries
between ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’ might lie, indeed whether such boundaries
might justly be said to exist or at least to have meaning. Where does delusion
take over? Are we deluding ourselves to think that it has not been in the
ascendant all along? Is there any scope, as Hans Sachs might advise us, to
manipulate the dark forces of Schopenhauerian Wahn? In many respects,
this Royal College of Music double-bill worked well; I was certainly left
thinking about what the works had in common and what they did not. I am not
entirely convinced, though, that Stephen Unwin’s staging of the former and
indeed David Harsent’s libretto always made as strong a case as they might have
done.
Two friends who had known Thomas
Hardy’s original short story beforehand felt more dissatisfied than I did. Whether I should
have felt differently had I too known the ‘original’, I am not sure. I am, to
quote an accessory to war crimes, ‘intensely relaxed’ about adaptations taking
on whatever new form is wished, so long as it works on its own terms.
Nevertheless, from having read the story since, I could not help but think that
something had been lost in ambiguity, whether by Harsent, Unwin, or, I suspect,
by both. The updating works well. A joyless marriage, kept in place by banker,
Stephen Foley’s money and, doubtless, by inertia, even by social pressure,
comes across well. In a programme note, Unwin speaks of ‘the lonely yearnings
of the housekeeper, Susan’; I found her somewhat under-written, though, and
indeed had thought her a mysteriously reappearing estate agent. (My fault in
the latter case, no doubt.)
What I missed, and what is
perhaps only really suggested by Watkins’s score, is a suggestion that the
poet-lodger, Ben Pascoe, for whom Ella falls might or might not be in her
imagination; realism ruled too strongly on stage. (Hardy called his tale The Imaginative Woman, which, sexism
aside, surely points to a more interesting reading.) There is a splendid addition
to that in Stephen’s talk about derivatives: surely the most lethal imaginary world
of our time. That perhaps made him the most interesting character, especially
when played with so strong a combination of toxic masculinity (Hannah Wolfe’s designs
surely helped too) and implicit, yet only implicit, doubt as by Thomas Erlank.
Otherwise, however, it is in the ghostly musical imaginings that seem to take
their linguistic leave as much from the later world of Owen Wingrave and Death in
Venice as from the more obvious Britten opera, that that realm seems
capable of musico-dramatic expression. A fascination with patterns, too,
however, seems fruitfully suggested, in the end once more reminding us of that Turn of the Screw precedent. I am
certainly not saying that what is heard musically must be recreated on stage,
or indeed match the words. A little too often, though, I found the score, as it
were, visually drowned out.
Such perhaps only became truly
apparent in retrospect, following the second half’s powerfully integrated
performance and production of The
Lighthouse. Here, claustrophobia and terror grabbed us by the neck and
never let go; yet so too did the suggestive and still surprising (however much
one ‘knows’) turns of the dramatic screw. This, it seems to me, is an opera
whose stature grows with every hearing, and London has been fortunate in recent
years with possibilities. Richard Pinkstone, James Atkinson, and Timothy Edlin
brought sharply characterised readings to their characters, yet their
interaction proved just as impressive. So too was the playing of the RCM Opera
Orchestra under Michael Rosewell: insidious purveyors and blenders of reality
and imagination, complementing and immeasurably enhancing Unwin’s resourceful
staging (not least Ralph Stokeld’s lighting, atmospheric and blinding by turn).
Peter Maxwell Davies’s cunning use and abuse of parody set boundaries and dissolved
them in oracular pronouncement. This was truly an apocalyptic pit of bestial
expressionism. Every minute, even every second, was made to count: repetition
never just repetition, development always called into question. Whether the
Beast were ‘real’, whatever that might mean, proved both the question and quite
beside the point. Tremendous stuff, then, as always: fully the equal of what we
should have any right to expect from London’s larger houses.
