The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera, 16 October 2024

Coliseum

Images: © Manuel Harlan
Peter Quint (Robert Murray), Flora (Victoria Nekhaenko),
Miles (Jerry Louth), The Governess (Ailish Tynan)

Governess – Ailish Tynan
Flora – Victoria Nekhaenko
Mrs Grose – Gweneth Ann Rand
Miles – Jerry Louth
Miss Jessel – Eleanor Dennis
Peter Quint – Robert Murray
Prologue – Alan Oke

Director, designs – Isabella Bywater
Lighting – Paul Anderson
Projections – Jon Driscoll

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Duncan Ward (conductor)

It had been a while since I last saw The Turn of the Screw, though there was a time when it seemed quite a regular . To my mind the strongest of Britten’s operas, it was last seen at the Coliseum in an excellent staging by David McVicar: again to my mind, one of his strongest. It now returns in a new ENO production by Isabella Bywater, also designed by her, with an impressive cast conducted by Duncan Ward. 

Flora, Miles, Mrs Grose (Gweneth Ann Rand), Governess

Bywater’s production seems generally to have been well received. Whilst acknowledging her effort to bring a new standpoint to the work, I am not convinced it succeeds; at least, it did not succeed so well for me as it apparently has for many. The drama is presented in the Governess’s flashbacks from a psychiatric hospital, events at Bly presumably at least having contributed to her committal. Scenic projections onto the hospital set lead us back to the house and its grounds: to my eyes, a little clumsily. This was clearly a traumatic, horrific experience for the Governess, all the more so as presented in a finely observed, deeply compassionate performance from Ailish Tynan. There is splendidly creepy – and chillingly meaningful – children’s play, for instance with Flora and her doll.

The problem – and I am not sure this was Bywater’s intention – is that in giving the impression the events may straightforwardly have been imagined by the Governess, the drama veers in a one-sided direction that has one ultimately question what the point of it might be. Asking ‘did the Governess see the ghosts’ is of course a reasonable and indeed necessary question; proceeding as Bywater does in her programme note and also, so it seems, onstage, to ask ‘Did she have a personality disorder?’ risks missing the point. ‘Ambiguity is what makes it unsettling,’ Bywater adds. Precisely, which is why it seems an odd move to rid it of most of that ambiguity; more disturbingly, it comes close to turning the Governess’s distress into a spectacle, and eclipsing the ‘real’ question of what has been done to the children. Having the Governess imagine so much seems both implausible and undesirable. It is perfectly possible, of course, to adopt a partial standpoint; many stagings of all manner of works do, with greater and lesser success. The Turn of the Screw, however, emerges somewhat shortchanged—whilst at the same time, to be fair, far from fruitlessly interrogated. 

Tynan’s performance was absolutely central to those fruits, both detailed and skilfully sketching the broader picture. Eleanor Dennis’s Miss Jessel and Robert Murray’s Peter Quint were similarly detailed portrayals, highly commendable, though the underlying premise perhaps worked all the more against them. Gweneth Ann Rand’s Mrs Grose, by turn warm and distanced, was permitted to offer greater ambiguity. Victoria Nekhaenko’s Flora and Jerry Louth’s Miles were both excellent too, walking dramatic tightropes with great skill and credibility, the latter’s icy delivery in particular both bringing home and into question the theme of innocence’s loss in work and staging. Alan Oke’s Prologue as medical consultant offered a masterclass in diction and framing, surtitles in fact proving unnecessary throughout.

Prologue (Alan Oke)

Ward’s musical interpretation seemed to have been formulated with Bywater’s concept in mind. Especially in the first act, a looser, more rhapsodic approach, suggestive of psychological disorder and even a shift from ghost story into outright horror, was prevalent. What I missed was a stronger sense of line, of the workings of scenic and longer-term construction, so crucial to this opera’s dramaturgy. Perhaps by design, this fell into clearer focus after the interval, suggesting a conflict between freedom and determinism far from irrelevant to the musical as well as stage action. Moments of horror registered in vividly pictorial fashion, at times presaging the desiccated late world of Death in Venice; their integration in this, perhaps Britten’s most constructivist score, was less clear.

Ultimately, then, Bywater’s production did not for me cohere as well as McVicar’s more straightforward yet deeply committed production or Anneliese McKimmon’s thoughtful, more properly ambiguous staging for Opera Holland Park in 2014. Likewise, the conducting of Charles Mackerras and Steuart Bedford on those occasions did more to enable and elucidate Britten’s turning of the musical screw. I was grateful nonetheless for the opportunity to have experienced it, not least for Tynan’s gripping Governess.

Miss Jessel (Eleanor Dennis), Peter Quint, Governess

Hänsel und Gretel, Opera Holland Park, 14 June 2023

Hänsel – Charlotte Badhma
Gretel – Laura Lolita Perešivana
Peter – Paul Carey Jones
Gertrud – Meeta Raval
Witch – Eleanor Dennis
Sandman – April Koyejo-Audiger
Dew Fairy – Charlotte Bowden

John Wilkie (director) 

Neil Irish (designs)
Robert Price (lighting)

Michael Spenceley (movement)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Dominic Ellis-Peckham) 

Children’s Chorus from the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School (chorus master: Scott Price) 

City of London Sinfonia

Kărin Hendrickson (conductor)

Hänsel (Charlotte Badhma), The Witch (Eleanor Dennis), Gretel (Laura Lolita Perešivana), 
Images: Ali Smith

It is always a joy to return to Holland Park: to Opera Holland Park, that is, the park itself being available all year around. Sometimes, the sense of it heralding summer can seem wildly optimistic; doubtless it did for those initially sampling the year’s first production, Rigoletto. Now that spring has finally not come, winter having suddenly jumped into summer, the season’s second, Hänsel und Gretel, was able to bask in that long anticipated magic of sunshine and warmth gradually ceding, peacock cries and all, to nightfall for the final act. 

Peter (Paul Carey Jones)

Hänsel, of course, is so magical a work that temptation can be to love it too much. Occasionally during the first two acts, I wondered whether conductor Kărin Hendrickson might be heading in that direction: not that, if I am honest, I mind. Someone taking her time is increasingly rare in music of many kinds, and the last thing one wants here is someone rushing us through the opera’s relatively few minutes. If I were to be excessively critical, I might say that there were a very few occasions when the score felt as if it were on the verge of losing momentum, though I am not sure it ever quite did. Instead, Hendrickson was setting up a considerable and welcome contrast with the antics and resolution of the third act, wrapping things up nicely, having allowed us to enjoy the ride. The City of London Sinfonia played like a little more than ‘fourteen angels’. Though a small band – notably smaller (strings 5:4:3:2:2) than we generally hear, and in a trickier acoustic too – they offered a dynamic and related emotional range to match any. It seemed clear that they enjoyed playing for Hendrickson—and doubtless to play such ‘late-Romantic’, for want of a better term, music too. If we want to hear the Staatskapelle Dresden and Colin Davis, we can go to the recording, but then we shall miss live performance and magical setting. 

Opera Holland Park Chorus

A likeable, characterful cast added much to the proceedings. Charlotte Badhma and Laura Lolita Perešivana complemented and contrasted each other in just the right ways, vocally and gesturally, as Hänsel and Gretel. Paul Carey Jones’s positively Wagnerian Peter was luxury casting indeed; here is a singer who knows how to make his voice carry, even many yards offstage, and yet there is no lack of flexibility, quite the contrary. Meeta Raval’s revealed a lyric soprano with distinct dramatic flair as Gertrud. Eleanor Dennis had a whale of a time as the Witch, in a performance as well sung as it was acted. April Koyejo-Audiger’s Sandman and Charlotte Bowden’s Dew Fairy eagerly took their chances to shine, as did members of the Opera Holland Park Chorus and a children’s chorus from the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School. Above all, this was a collaborative and sustainable performance. 

Gertrud (Meeta Raval)

For better or worse, productions of this work tend to shy away from its darkest subtexts. John Wilkie’s was no exception here. I admit to not being entirely sure what Wilkie’s concept was. Updated to the interwar years, there seemed in the first scene to be an interest in the family’s poverty, albeit an interest not really sustained. Fairytale, dream-like characters had already appeared in the Overture, lending a sense of mystery; their choreographed return at the end of the second act seemed (at least to me) less motivated. I suspect something psychoanalytical was intended. For whilst this was certainly no militantly traditionalist staging, an overall framework eluded me, as did the significance of the Witch peeling off exaggeratedly ‘feminine’ clothing to reveal a ‘masculine’, albeit highly caricatured military uniform. Fascism, I suppose, though more of a Fawlty Towers variety than something more sinister—or meaningful. In any case, she was soon gone. Perhaps that was the point; if so, it was a distinctly odd one. None of this detracted unduly, though, in what remained a lovely yet never too lovely evening,  sampling ideas that might yet be considered a little more seriously and/or magically.

Gloriana, English National Opera, 8 December 2022

Coliseum

Queen Elizabeth I – Christine Rice
Robert Devereuz, Earl of Essex – Robert Murray
Frances, Countess of Essex – Paula Murrihy
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy – Duncan Rock
Penelope, Lady Rich – Eleanor Dennis
Sir Robert Cecil – Charles Rice
Sir Walter Raleigh – David Soar
Henry Cuffe – Alex Otterburn
A Lady-in-Waiting – Alexandra Oomens
The Recorder of Norwich, A Ballad Singer – Willard White
A Housewife – Claire Barnett-Jones
The Spirit of the Masque – Innocent Masuku

Ruth Knight (director)
Sarah Bowern (costumes)
Corinne Young (wigs, hair, make-up)
Ian Jackson-French (lighting)
Barbora Šenoltová (video)

English National Opera Chorus (chorus director: Mark Biggins)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Images (c) Nirah Sanghani
Frances, Countess of Essex (Paula Murrihy), Queen Elizabeth I (Christine Rice)

Britten’s Gloriana is a strange work, both in itself and considered as a ‘coronation opera’. It is no Clemenza di Tito, idealising, instructing, and even gently warning a king, at least in Mozart’s version, that affairs of state must always have precedence over those of his own heart. Or is it, even if not by intent? The first Queen Elizabeth, as presented here by Britten and William Plomer, after Lytton Strachey, does not exactly prosper by indulging her favourite, the Earl of Essex. It is not, however, difficult to understand why many thought the presentation of an ageing monarch inappropriate as a way to greet the new reign of Gloriana’s twentieth-century successor. In many ways, The Crown has nothing on this—save for superior dramaturgy. If the strangeness of Gloriana’s (verbal) archaisms can be explained, perhaps even understood, the awkwardness of its first act in particular surely would have merited revision, had opportunity presented itself. Plomer certainly did Britten no favours. 

Similar things may be said, though, of many operas. We have what we have, and ENO did it proud, in just the sort of performance the company and its supporters alike needed to hear. Electrified by the moment of the Arts Council’s latest disgraceful philistinism—scrapping its grant altogether and bundling it off to Manchester, without so much as a word of consultation with venues, existing companies, or local government—this felt like a true coming together, to bless a problematical work more completely than may have been the case upon its first outing and, in my opinion, when revived at Covent Garden in 2013, sixty years after its premiere. Martyn Brabbins and the ENO Orchestra proved at least the equals of Paul Daniel and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. If anything, I think they may have been more incisive, still more committed. There was certainly a strong sense of grounding in Britten’s music; one could draw many a comparison with other of the composer’s dramatic music, dating back past Billy Budd and The Rape of Lucretia at least as far as Peter Grimes, yet sometimes also peering into the future. There is not a huge amount that can be done about some of the duller passages, and a masque without dancing is not ideal, but there remained enough at least to intrigue. Ruth Knight’s direction and the ‘concert staging’ in general were obviously limited in what they could achieve, yet as a framework for something considerably more than a concert performance worked well: perhaps something of a model for further revivals, should ENO fare better than Essex in escaping the executioner’s axe. 

There was much to enjoy and admire in the singing. In the title role, Christine Rice offered imperious and internally conflicted as very much two sides to the same Elizabethan coin. Robert Murray’s Essex seemed particularly at home with the particular blend of verbal and musical line required here, not least in the lute songs with which he would seduce his queen. Paula Murrihy proved an affecting Frances, doubtless in part a reflection of the more interesting standpoint of her role, although it remains necessary for an artist to grasp that opportunity—here accomplished in captivating fashion. Duncan Rock, a memorable Don Giovanni, presented a splendidly rutting Mountjoy; if the role fizzles out somewhat, there is very little that can be done about that. Eleanor Dennis’s Penelope complemented him and the other intriguers nicely. 

Earl of Essex (Robert Murray), Countess of Essex,
Charles Blount (Duncan Rock), Lady Rich (Eleanor Dennis)

There was no weak link in the cast, and crucially a strong sense, even in this single performance, of a company coming together as more than the sum of its parts. Two ENO Harewood Artists (Alexandra Oomens and Innocent Masuku) shone, a nice symmetry since Lord Harewood, the second Elizabeth’s cousin, according to some accounts cajoled her into accepting the dedication—and had her and Prince Philip attend a prior dinner-party run-through, at which the royal couple may not have been entirely amused. So too did two former Harewood Artists: Alex Otterburn and the wonderfully spirited Claire Barnett-Jones as a housewife in the penultimate scene. Will someone with power and influence take note? Who knows? Someone certainly should—and fast, before ENO’s death warrant is executed.

Le nozze di Figaro, Royal College of Music, 30 November 2018

Britten Theatre

Count Almaviva – Thomas Isherwood

Countess Almaviva – Eleanor Dennis

Susanna – Catriona Hewitson

Figaro – Theodore Platt

Cherubino – Anna Cooper

Marcellina – Holly-Marie Bingham

Dr Bartolo – Timothy Edlin

Don Basilio – Glen Cunningham

Don Curzio – Samuel Jenkins

Barbarina – Milly Forrest

Antonio – Peter Edge

Two Bridesmaids – Camilla Harris, Jessica Cale

Sir Thomas Allen (director)

Lottie Higlett (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)

Kate Flatt (choreography)

Royal College of Music Opera Chorus (chorus master: Leanne Singh-Levett)

Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

A lively, enthusiastic young cast, as skilled at acting as at singing, proved the definite highlight of the Royal College of Music’s end-of-term Marriage of Figaro. There was no weak link, each of the singers offering something particular in roles many of us perhaps know all too well. At this stage in their careers, singers will always have a good deal of vocal development to await. Nevertheless, from the stern and angry Count of Thomas Isherwood to the decidedly luxury casting of Milly Forrest’s Barbarina, there was much to enjoy here. Eleanor Dennis, an RCM alumna deputising at the last minute, offered a noble Countess: poised, dignified, pained, and compassionate, an object lesson to her younger collaborators. Theodore Platt and Catriona Hewitson sparkled as a likeable, stylish pair of servants, Figaro and Susanna, Holly-Marie Bingham’s Marcellina and Timothy Edlin’s Bartolo perhaps giving a splendidly knowing hint of where the characters, if hardly the singers, might find themselves in a few years’ time.

Michael Rosewell’s conducting was sane enough: something to be grateful for in an age of perverse, often downright ugly Mozart ‘interpretation’. It lacked charm, though, orchestral writing too often going unshaped, even barely phrased at all. A few too many disjunctures between pit and stage were skilfully retrieved, yet all in all – and this is quite a different thing from minutes on the clock – the pace somewhat dragged, a greater sense of the musical whole proving elusive.

There was not much to glean, either, from Thomas Allen’s production. It was less aggressively, even offensively ‘traditional’ than the Figaro I last saw at the RCM (Jean-Claude Auvray, 2012), yet it would be difficult to claim any great insights. (Not that an extraordinarily disruptive – drunken? – audience, laughing and applauding almost every bar, seemed to seek insight; alas, the Glyndebourne Guffaw Brigade seemed very much to be at large.) Notwithstanding a strange initial preoccupation with babies, soon dropped, as it were, the production was very much school of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, albeit on a necessarily less grand scale. What worked in the mid-Seventies – in many ways gloriously, as we may still see on film, Karl Böhm’s presence certainly not hindering – does not necessarily ring so true four decades later. Why would it? Additional elements of something bordering on silliness did not help. There was not much more to it than that. I have little doubt that the cast would have learned much from working with Allen; I have little doubt, moreover, that that showed in their own character portrayals and their interaction.

For a greater idea, be it of the eighteenth century or any other, I sought in vain: a pity, given that two other London conservatoire performances of the last few years have offered much food for thought. The Guildhall (Martin Lloyd-Evans, 2013) offered, in retrospect, chilling presentiments of #MeToo in an American electoral campaign, whilst the Royal Academy’s gentle updating to pre-revolutionary Cuba (Janet Suzman, 2015) brought forth perhaps the single finest, all in all, Figaro I have seen and heard. Claus Guth’s Strindbergian Salzburg production of the previous decade doubtless changed the work forever. It need not, indeed should not, be imitated. Some awareness and communication of the work’s savage darkness, however, is now for many of us a crucial starting point, as much as it would be for Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. Mozart never suffers from sharply etched chiaroscuro. Still, there will surely be another opportunity before too long – and better this than the incoherent nonsense I endured from Johannes Erath in Dresden a couple of months ago.

Così fan tutte, Opera Holland Park, 31 May 2018

Fiordiligi (Eleanor Dennis) and Guglielmo (Nicholas Lester)
Image: Ali Wright

Fiordiligi – Eleanor Dennis

Dorabella – Kitty Whately

Guglielmo – Nicholas Lester

Ferrando – Nick Pritchard

Despina – Sarah Tynan

Don Alfonso – Peter Coleman-Wright

Oliver Platt (director)

Alyson Cummins (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfonia

Dane Lam (conductor)

Absence makes the heart grow fonder; or does it? In Così fan tutte, who knows? Or rather, what could such a question even mean? Would it not be a typically sentimental coping mechanism adopted to avoid confronting the questions – artificial yet profound, indeed profound through artificiality – it asks of its characters and its audiences alike? If one does not at some level, perhaps the most important level of all, find that Così goes deeper and further than Tristan, then one most likely has not understood either. Given a tragedy without catharsis, a tragedy in the clothes, surpassingly elegant and ravishing, of comedy: sometimes one might ask who needs an opus metaphysicum at all? (We might actually need it in order to recover.)

Ferrando (Nick Pritchard), Guglielmo, Depsina (Sarah Tynan), Don Alfonso (Peter Coleman-Wright),
Fiordiligi, Dorabella (Kitty Whately)
Image and subsequent images: Robert Workman

At any rate, absence had certainly made my heart grow still fonder when it came to Opera Holland Park. Not having been able to visit last summer, I returned to what may well be the most completely successful show I have yet to see and hear there. There is certainly none I would put above it, quite a claim, given that we are dealing with Mozart, the most difficult of all composers to perform. There is nowhere to hide, on stage, in the pit, nor indeed in the audience. Nor should there be. Moreover, one had the sense, whether in production or in musical performance – the distinction is far from distinct – that this ambivalent, ambiguous, existentially devastating drama was being enabled, with the lightest of touches, to speak for itself. That does not happen by itself; there is no room for ‘non-interpretation’, for some illusory ‘original’. Yet nor did it ever seem that something was being inflicted on the work. There is room for critique, whether in words or in performance, yet sometimes, as here, the work is so rich that it both offers its own and, perhaps, renders it beside the point.

Don Alfonso

For what is Così, if it is not a musico-dramatic laboratory, a game whose results we should rather not know, and yet can never quite un-know? We see that in Oliver Platt’s production: not spelled out, ‘in a laboratory’, but actually more or less where it ‘should’ be, in an eighteenth-century setting, in which detail is everything. The more we look at what might seem a straightforward, ‘traditional’ production – and, in a sense, is – the more we see – and hear. The chorus, which like us watches proceedings and occasionally participates, is, from the start, a participant and perhaps a critic. It is not quite the Neapolitan ‘daily passeggio’ of which Leopold Mozart wrote, in a letter quoted by Helen Wallace in the programme, for that was perhaps too obviously theatrical, at any rate too bound to a particular stratum of the social hierarchy: ‘in a few hundred carriages the nobles go out driving in the afternoon until Ave Maria to the Strada Nuova and the Molo.’ These seem largely to be more ‘ordinary’ people, but what is ‘ordinary’? They are like us, perhaps, but they also remind us that we need not be ‘like’, or at least identical to, the principal characters on stage to learn from them. And so, when one looks more closely, one notices an apparently ‘male’ member of the ‘chorus’ in apparently ‘female’ dress. (S)he brings no particular other attention to himself or herself. There is no obvious plotline, no ‘distraction’, as some would have it, rightly or wrongly; there is also no obvious exit strategy for us on heteronormative or other grounds. Così fan tutti/e; or, mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur. 

Fiordiligi and Ferrando

All, however, is not always quite what it seems. For the commedia dell’arte painted faces of Ferrando and Guglielmo are there to start with: visitors, perhaps, from beyond, yet also in need of external transformation – in Tristan, it would be a potion – in order to reveal themselves. Interactions between characters, like those between different chemical elements, are minutely observed, rendering us experimenters of our own, again whether we like it or not. (At least, so long as we watch and listen.) One of the problems some people, not unreasonably, seem to have with this opera is not always appreciating the level of parody, verbal and musical. And so, when Fiordiligi stands on a chair to assume her pose for ‘Come scoglio’, that cruel, loving, and in every sense ravishing seria parody, she initially falters, almost falling (not, I hasten to add, vocally). The watching lovers laugh, and she resumes. All is not quite what it seems, or perhaps it is. That is largely up to us, yet within the framework constructed – or rather within the different, intersecting frameworks constructed, by Alfonso and Despina, by Mozart and Da Ponte, and by production and performers; as well, of course, as that constructed by our own experiences, thoughts, and emotions. We are led to deconstruct that terrifying final ‘moral’ ourselves, Mozart’s brusque neo-Classicism the only possible response to Da Ponte’s seemingly straight hymn to reason. If we do not think about, do not feel its numerous contradictions, we have no one to blame but ourselves – not unlike the characters themselves. Is all perhaps precisely what it seems? Yes and no.

Dorabella and Guglielmo

For it is Mozart above all who renders this opera such a necessary agony. And it is the musicians who – with the greatest respect to truly excellent work from everyone else involved, whether in the theatre, behind the scenes, or somewhere in between – who ultimately bring that into life. The City of London Sinfonia offered us gorgeous musical sado-masochism, woodwind one might almost literally have been willing to die for, strings incisive yet far from without warmth of their own. Dane Lam’s tempi began on the quick side, never unreasonably so, yet indicative of an approach one might too readily have taken to be partial. For, as the drama progressed, as the characters achieved greater delineation, so did temporal differentiation. Lam’s was a reading that knew where it was going, and thus could afford to take time on the way – in, for instance, a heartrending ‘Un aura amoroso’.

Not that that would have been heartrending without an estimable Ferrando, of course; that was not, happily, something we needed to put to the test, Nick Pritchard balancing with apparent ease the demands of line and variegation. So too did Nicholas Lester’s Guglielmo, the bitterness of his disillusion moving indeed, his ‘journey’ perhaps the greatest of all. Eleanor Dennis and Kitty Whately likewise proved almost infinitely capable both of sisterly affinity and dramatic disentanglement. So many attributes – sorrow and joy, honour and temptation, simplicity and complexity – were revealed as sides of the same experimental coin. Lines, unadorned or subtly ornamented, exuded both clarity and warmth. We knew them, and yet did not. Sarah Tynan’s Despina was very much the musical catalyst, her cynicism and her sense of fun both vividly portrayed. If Peter Coleman Wright’s pitch was sometimes a little approximate, he brought important dramatic truths to his portrayal of Don Alfonso – perhaps not unlike Francesco Bussani, first in his line. The chorus, well trained, by Richard Harker, could hardly have done more to bring their roles, individual and collective, to life.

Fiordiligi and Dorabella

There is method in the madness one feels at the close; there has to be. And yet, quite rightly, there remains mystery too. Or, in the ruminations of another operatic character, forced to confront truths of existence he might rather not – at least not too often: ‘Ein Kobold half wohl da:/Ein Glühwurm fand sein Weibchen nicht; der hat den Schaden angericht’t.’ Was Sachs just rephrasing the question? Probably. Are we? Almost certainly. That does not, however, mean that we are not confronting it, that we need not do so. Mozart leads us to Wagner, as well as Wagner to Mozart.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, English National Opera, 1 March 2018

Coliseum

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Trinity Boys Choir (c) Robert Workman

Puck – Miltos Yerolemou

Oberon – Christopher Ainslie
Tytania – Soraya Mafi
Hermia – Clare Presland
Lysander – David Webb
Demetrius – Matthew Durkan
Helena – Eleanor Dennis
Quince – Graeme Danby
Bottom – Joshua Bloom
Starveling – Simon Butteriss
Snout – Timothy Robinson
Flute – Robert Murray
Snug – Jonathan Lemalu
Theseus – Andri Björn Róbertsson
Hippolyta – Emma Carrington
Cobweb – Aman de Silva
Peaseblossom – Lucas Rebato
Mustardseed – Caspar Burman
Moth – Dionysium Sevastakis
 

Robert Carsen (director, lighting)

Emmanuelle Bastet (associate director)
Michael Levine (designs)
Peter van Praet (lighting)
Matthew Bourne, Daisy May Kemp (choreography)


Trinity Boys’ Choir (choirmaster: David Swinson)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Alexander Soddy (conductor)

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Soraya Mafi Trinity Boys Choir Joshua Bloom 3 (c) Robert Workman

 

Twenty-two years is a ripe old age for an opera production nowadays. Production styles date quickly; were the idiotic description ‘timeless’ not already shop-soiled before it tripped off the tongue, it soon would be in this world. More fundamentally, production concerns will quickly transform too. Such is the nature of our ever-changing world and thus of the theatre which, in varying degrees of the oblique, holds up a mirror to it. Robert Carsen’s 1995 ENO production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream looks fresher than I should ever have imagined. Visits to houses from France to China notwithstanding, it might have been new at the Coliseum this March. I wonder, never having seen it before, how much has been revised and restored. Much, I suspect: that, surely, is the business of keeping a production, of necessity far from ‘timeless’, in the repertory. And there is certainly a case, without that descending into mere conservatism, for ENO to ‘curate’ its repertory of productions a little more carefully than has sometimes been the case in the recent past.

 

A giant bed delimits much of the action’s limits. Such an image can hardly fail to suggest something sexual, although, by the same token, it would be disingenuous to claim too much that is overt, or even covert, in that respect. There is a sense of childlike, or at least childish (not the same, as Britten of all composers would surely have known) play to the proceedings too: such, after all, is how children, at least in their (alleged) innocence, will speak of a bed. Beyond that, the Coliseum space is used inventively, occasionally spilling out beyond the stage, yet never merely for the sake of it, and never to the extent of the wearily predictable. Lighting (Carsen himself and Peter van Praet) is sensitive, revealingly suggestive of different worlds, different times; likewise Michael Levine’s designs. There is an almost ravishing beauty to the proceedings of this Athenian forest, from which it would take a sterner soul than mine entirely to recoil.

 

I certainly saw no reason to do so, and found the first two acts fairly sped by. As for the third, perhaps the problem is mine. There are people who complain about alleged longueurs in Elektra (!) and Der Rosenkavalier, their complete absence (to me) notwithstanding, who find the play within a play riveting, even hilarious. I am afraid I find it all too straightforwardly a ‘tedious play’. Oh well: it does none of us any harm to try to understand what others see and hear in something – and, if we cannot do so, simply put up with it for a while. In any case, Alexander Soddy led a knowing, sensitive, often truly magical account of the score throughout. Its allusions to other scores, other composers were clear enough without underlining. What seems to me ultimately far more interesting in Britten – and that is doubtless as much a matter of my own preoccupations as anything else – is the way he constructs his music. That generative, impulse was equally to the fore here. Indeed, although I am far from a paid-up admirer of this opera, I found myself, until the third act at least, fascinated at the interplay between local colour and atmosphere, broadly construed, on the one hand, and that rather sinister build-up of mechanistic forces on the other. None of that, of course, could have been achieved without the excellent understanding of the ENO Orchestra.

 

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Andri Björn Róbertsson Emma Carrington Matthew Durkan Eleanor Dennis David Webb Clare Presland (c) Robert Workman

The cast proved excellent too, with no weak links: a testimony to fine casting as well as to fine performance. The quartet of lovers – Clare Presland, David Webb, Matthew Durkan, and Eleanor Dennis – was handsome in every sense, as vocally refined as impressive of stage manner. One really felt – which is surely part of the point – that one would have been happy with any conceivable outcome to the madness of the forest, and would not necessarily have minded being included oneself. Christopher Ainslie and Soraya Mafi made for an equally finely sung, nicely contrasted king and queen of the fairies, attended to by a properly rascally Puck (Miltos Yerolemou) and outstanding Trinity Boys’ Choir. The rustics and temporal monarchs all had much to offer too. Were I to name them here, I should simply be repeating the cast list above. This was the sort of company performance for which ENO used to be renowned; I hope that it will now continue to be so.

 

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Christopher Ainslie

Miltos Yerolemou 3 (c) Robert Workman

And yet, and yet… you may have felt a ‘but’ coming. If so, your instincts did not err. For Carsen’s production has returned at the expense of Christopher Alden’s brilliant 2011 staging, quite the best I have seen. It did what those of us less suffocated by the post-Britten English musical establishment, more open – like the young Britten, aspirant pupil of Berg – to artistic developments beyond these grey shores, would have thought obvious, yet seemingly no one had dared previously attempt. The sexual darkness not only of Britten’s past and present, but also of this work, was tackled head on, in a boys’ school setting that left one in no doubt there could be no happy endings here. By contrast, chez Carsen – and however unfair the retrospective comparison – everything is a little too well-ordered in its fantasy, a little too blithe in its heteronormativity, a little too distant from shadows of power and the abuses that accompany it.

 

There is no reason in principle, of course, why there should not be room for both approaches, and indeed for many more. Whether, however, we should be papering over awkward cracks specifically now, in the age of #metoo, the Jimmys Savile and Levine, et al. is another question. I never cease to be amazed quite how lightly Britten gets off in this respect, but that doubtless tells its own story or stories. Not that I am suggesting we need necessarily always sit in judgement: a large part, after all, of the role of drama is to explore, to tease out. A dramatic work is neither a court case nor a treatise. There is, though, surely far more to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its ideological framework than is acknowledged here. I hope the decision not to revive Alden was not taken because ‘traditionalists’ and those in positions of power – often one and the same – were ‘offended’, or running scared. Perhaps, then, next time, might we return to Alden, or see something with insights altogether new?

 

Carmen, English National Opera, 20 May 2015

Coliseum

(sung in English)

Carmen – Justina Gringyte

Don José – Eric Cutler

Escamillo – Leigh Melrose

Micaëla – Eleanor Dennis

Zuniga – Graeme Danby

Moralès – George Humphreys

Frasquita – Rhian Lois

Mercédès – Claire Presland

Dancairo – Geoffrey Dolton

Remendado – Alan Rhys-Jenkins

Lillas Pastia – Toussaint Meghie

Girl – Sophia Elton

Calixto Bieito (director)

Joan Antonio Recchi (revival director)

Alfons Flores (set designs)

Mercè Paloma (costumes)

Bruno Poet (lighting)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

Sir Richard Armstrong (conductor)

 

When I saw this production open in 2012, I opened by writing, ‘A triumph for ENO! I suspected that Carmen would prove eminently suited to Calixto Bieito’s talents, and so it proved. Shorn of any ‘picturesque’ pandering – remember Francesco Zambello and her donkey? – what we saw here is perfectly attuned to Bizet’s resolutely unsentimental score.’ And so it still very much seems, under the able revival direction of Bieito’s then assistant, Joan Anton Rechi. The updating to the tawdry end of the vicious Franco regime continues to resonate; violence is in the air and more than in the air. At any point, it can and will claim its victims, many of whom we see on display here. We too live in a militarised society, although one that remains slightly more bashful about proclaiming itself to be such; we can draw parallels without their in any sense being forced upon us. We certainly know poverty, racism, misogyny, and the other forces we see depicted on stage; we also know, increasingly well, child abuse – and the figure of the small girl, both loved and abandoned by her mother, looks to an uncertain future most likely to be cyclical, or worse.

But above all, Bieito’s mastery of his craft as director and storyteller comes through. Characters who can sometimes seem romanticised, caricatured, even one-dimensional are more complex than we generally see. Carmen stands out less than is often the case; her vulnerability is as much social as personal, and all the more credible for that placing. Likewise Micaëla’s greater capacity for agency, her deviousness – no mere ‘angel’ on this occasion – make her a far more interesting character. Has she even invented the story about Don José’s mother? She certainly expresses triumph upon prizing him away from Carmen, harking back to the first scene in which she cannot prevent herself from kissing him – and clearly feels no shame in having done so. ‘Franco or his successors?’ I asked last time. ‘Is there that much of a difference, especially under the present regime?’ We may make substitutions across history, across the world, whilst at the same time remaining plausible specificity, indeed ruthless realism.

Ryan Wigglesworth conducted an excellent account last time; I am not sure that Sir Richard Armstrong was not finer still. Each act had its own colour, its own pace, but the ineluctable calling of Fate drove, in the best sense, the action forward. The ENO Orchestra was on top form, its woodwind solos full of character, fresh and subtle as a fine manzanilla. The strings dazzled in as impressive an orchestral performance as I have heard in the Coliseum all year. Likewise, the chorus, of which the director asks a great deal, was its typical excellent self. These were individuals but they were also a threatening and threatened mass.

Justina Gringyte was somewhat more aloof than Ruxandra Donose, but equally convincing as a character. Hauteur, relatively speaking, worked well here, and she could certainly turn on the charm when required. Her lines were clean, and her slightly accented English equally clear. Don José is a difficult role; in the beginning, Eric Cutler seemed a little too generalised, too lacking in charisma. However, he seemed, especially in the context of a strong company, to grow into the role. Leigh Melrose’s reprise of Escamillo offered an uncommonly subtle reading, in which the relationship between vulnerability and machismo – ever a ‘Spanish’ theme, even for a Frenchman such as Bizet – was intriguingly explored. Eleanor Dennis’s revisionist Micäela did not lack for sweetness of tone, especially during her third-act aria. Rhian Lois and Clare Presland offered vividly characterised readings of Frasquita and Mercédès. Special mention should be offered to Sophia Elton as that frightened, yet strong, little girl.

Those who have yet to see Bieito’s Carmen should hasten to the Coliseum; those who have done so before will need no encouragement from me. Let us hope, as I concluded in 2012, for more Bieito from ENO – and, indeed, for the Royal Opera to enlist his services too. The former enfant terrible is now widely recognised as one of the most thoughtful, provocative opera directors at work today; we need to see more of him in London. More from Armstrong would be no bad thing too.