Philip Venables, 4.48 Psychosis, Royal Opera, 24 April 2018

Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Images: ROH/Stephen Cummiskey

Gwen – Gweneth-Ann Rand

Jen – Lucy Hall

Suzy – Susanna Hurrell

Clare – Samantha Price

Emily – Rachael Lloyd

Lucy – Lucy Schaufer

Ted Huffman (director)

Hannah Clark (designs)

D.M. Wood (lighting)

Pierre Martin (video)

Sound Intermedia (sound design)

Sarah Fahie, Rc-Annie (movement)

CHROMA

Richard Baker (conductor)

Philip Venables’s 4.48 Psychosis, based on Sarah Kane’s final play, seems to have received a largely rapturous reception, at least from opera critics, on its first outing in 2016. I missed it then, so was very curious to catch it on its revival: one of the Royal Opera’s ventures outside Covent Garden – perhaps aptly, in a theatre, the Hammersmith Lyric, known for its spoken theatre rather than for opera. I seem to be somewhat out on a limb here – only somewhat, since my impressions are far from uniformly negative – but I am afraid I found myself, on the basis of a first encounter, more troubled by doubts than some. (I should certainly not put it stronger than that.) It is genuinely not my intent to find fault for the sake of it; I suspect, moreover, that much may more be a matter of my own aesthetic preconceptions and preoccupations. However, given so enthusiastic a reception, there is perhaps room also for a moderately dissenting voice; it is not as if anyone won over is going to have his or her mind changed by someone who failed to ‘get it’.

Effort has certainly been extended, by composer, production team, and performers alike, in transforming this enigmatic, fragmentary play into an opera. As is often, although far from always the case, that has involved an element of simplification. We have characters and a more concrete setting, the latter still at a relative level of abstraction and/or malleability. The same could be said of the former, barring the protagonist, Gwen, and her psychiatrist (one presumes), Lucy, and even they can come together in the mass of five voices so as to present something beyond, or perhaps before, mere individuality. The use of ensemble often works well, breaking down or not, as the case may be – not unlike what we see on stage. A central narrative is much clearer: if, in the play, we know where everything is heading, even without knowing that that was precisely where Kane’s life was heading, temporal sequence is perhaps clearer, or at least less fragmentary, which may or may not be the same thing.

There is genuine musico-theatrical imagination, arguably innovation, too. Use of titles to present unspoken or unsung thoughts and words is not unknown, often playing, as here, with mismatch between what we see and what we hear. Here, however, it often seems an especially apt response. If an oft-posed – too often, perhaps – question in opera, is ‘Why are they singing?’ then here one might ask, ‘Why are they not singing?’ Two percussionists in the ‘pit’ – actually above the stage, adding, alongside some of the multifarious musical styles employed, to something of a nightclub feel – correspond syllabically with each other, ‘their’ or rather the ‘characters’’ words ‘typed’ out below. Likewise the psychiatric test of counting down in sevens makes its near-deadly appearance on that wall of further action between instrumentalists and stage. There was certainly no gainsaying the excellence of the musical performances either. Gweneth-Ann Rand and Lucy Schaufer stood perhaps as first among equals, but this was a vocal ensemble to be reckoned with by any standards. Likewise the players of CHROMA under Richard Baker’s clearly expert direction proved a match for any new music ensemble. Without knowing the work at all, there seemed little doubt that we were hearing what we should, in duly incisive performances.

And yet, I had a nagging suspicion, sometimes more than that, that it was performative and production excellence that were pulling this together in the direction it wanted – or we wanted it – to go. Was there actually that much more to the mélange of sections of music, often perhaps on the verge of noise – a meaningful distinction or not? – here? After all, a confused barrage of sounds may perhaps lend itself a little too readily to depiction of or engagement in psychosis. What of the clichés of Bach quotation and a modernised – post-modernised? – early music ‘lament’? Perhaps, though, that is the point. I readily acknowledge that it might be. Is not treating operatic music simply ‘as music’ almost always to miss the point? As a scholar of Wagner and opera more generally, I can hardly deny that. Likewise to make comparisons to original source material; again, as a scholar and indeed devotee of… Perhaps, then, it was more of a matter of my not necessarily having ‘liked’ the often popular musical styles, whether taped (presumably) or live. Again, that may well be the, or at least a, point. It is hardly much of a criticism to say ‘I did not like that.’

Even, at a more fundamental level, my doubt as to how much of an opera this was, interest in the voice, whether ‘intrinsic’ or ‘dramatic’, not always immediately apparent, might well be answered with many historical and contemporary examples of that too being the point. I could not help but think of Stravinsky’s typically artful twin avowal and disavowal of participation in such debates: ‘The Rake’s Progress seemed to have been created for journalistic debates concerning: a) the historical validity of the approach; and, b) the question whether I am guilty of imitation and pastiche. If the Rake contains imitations, however – of Mozart, as has been said – I will gladly allow the charge (given the breadth of the Aristotelian word), if I may thereby release people from the argument and bring them to the music.’ Was I involved in the drama, wherever that lay? Yes. If so, does it matter what my ‘ideas’ of opera might be? Probably not. After all, there is, or at least was, a long operatic tradition, both non-Wagnerian and non-Stravinskian, in which ‘the work’ takes less than centre-stage, in which the performative, contingent element is stronger. Perhaps Venables’s opera, then, lies closer to Rossini and Donizetti than to those works with which I stand more at home, and therein lies my ‘problem’; perhaps that problem is mine, and mine alone.

My next London opera visit will be to hear George Benjamin’s new work, also from the Royal Opera. Who knows what that will hold? I suspect, however, based upon his first two operas, that it will prove more to my taste, perhaps to my understanding too.

Mark Simpson, Pleasure, Royal Opera, 12 May 2016

(London premiere)

 

Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Nathan – Timothy Nelson

Val – Lesley Garrett
Anna Fewmore – Steven Page
Matthew – Nick Pritchard

Tim Albery (director)

Leslie Travers (designs)
Malcolm Rippeth (lighting)

Psappha
Nicholas Kok (conductor)

New work from composers new to opera – sometimes, as here, in the guise of co-commissions from the Royal Opera, Aldeburgh Music, and Opera North – has been prominent amongst the highlights from the Royal Opera House’s recent seasons. The London premiere of Mark Simpson’s first opera, Pleasure, would doubtless have taken place in the ROH’s own Linbury Studio Theatre, had it not been closed for refurbishment; instead, we travelled across town to the Hammersmith Lyric as part of a welcome trend for collaboration between London’s opera houses and alternative theatres and spaces. It may have been a bit of a trek for those of us living in the East – not, I promise, the only reason for my enthusiasm for the Hackney Empire – but the results, compositional and performative, justified the journey, and it is always interesting in itself to discover how opera will flourish, or otherwise, at a different venue.

 

Pleasure, we learned from the composer’s own note, was inspired by his ‘own experience of Liverpool’s nightlife’ during his late teens and early twenties. ‘One evening, as I stood pouring my heart out to a toilet attendant in one of the clubs, I suddenly started to see the world around me with a new sense of objectivity. I asked myself whether she might know much more about the clientele than she appeared to.’ At about the same time, in 2008, Simpson had begun to read Melanie Challenger’s poetry collection, Galatea: ‘Up until this point I had never experienced the written word as viscerally as I had experienced musical sound.’ His Royal Liverpool Philharmonic commission, A mirror-fragment… was inspired by one of her poems, and he asked Challenger, ‘in the pub after the premiere’ whether she would be willing to write a libretto for the opera whose idea had been taking root. ‘She immediately agreed, and so began our fruitful collaborative partnership.’

 

Not having read the programme beforehand, I admit that I had not noticed the background presence of the Hephaestus myth until reading Challenger’s note. One can certainly experience the story, ‘about a woman working in a gay bar who helps the young, lost men but is also inexplicable to them,’ purely on its own terms. However, on reflection – and a good, non-disposable opera will surely, whatever the philistines claim, always lend itself to reflection – the act of revenge of the unwanted son has provided me not only with an analogy but with a foundation for further consideration of the events and their presentation. In that respect, this may be considered in the best sense a highly traditional opera.

 

Simpson’s score treads a successful line between two understandings of setting: that of environment and that of the words and action. ‘Sound world’ might be an overused term, but here, I think, it really deserves mention. There is no mere imitation or importation of the sounds of clubland; the magic Mozart works with eighteenth-century dance music is, after all, alchemical, not mimetical. There is nevertheless much that is evocative: not just the synthesiser sound – often present, but never overused, and rarely albeit tellingly employed as the principal sonic ingredient – and not just the rhythms (for instance, of drag queen Anna Fewmore’s most public commentary), but also, and perhaps for me most intriguingly, in the darkness of the typical band sonority. Redolent in some respects of Weill before he (more or less) sold out, albeit a Weill of now rather than ‘then’, the music presents and furthers not only such alienation but also invitation. Indeed, the one feeds off the other, the drama anything but Brechtian: again, if I may, rather traditionally operatic. Henze came to my mind as, if not an inspiration, at least a forerunner.

 

Likewise its structuring and the consequent crystallisation of moments of realisation, of emotional climaxes. Val’s final lament belongs to, or at least may be placed in, a tradition one might trace back through Janáček to Purcell, and further back still. Having lost her son, Nathan, once, through the distant yet present tragedy of her rape, she has now lost him again, finally, from an overdose, brought on by her denial that she was the woman he thought – and presumably still knew – her to be. ‘A son she never wanted to have/A son she never wanted to know’. She cannot quite rise to the occasion as a Puccini heroine would; that, surely, is the point. Yet, ‘I’ll embrace you as I should have done. I’ll tell you that I know you.’ Meanwhile, in time-honoured tradition, the sounds of a callous external world intrude; Anna Fewmore calls. ‘Come, all you exquisite creatures. Come!’ That final cry echoes and subverts, yet also offers catharsis of a sort. The loneliness of all concerned – to whom we must add Matthew, intoxicated by Nathan’s beauty, cruelly disabused by the cynical wisdom of the drag queen who has seen it all – is perhaps the strongest echo of all, brought to dramatic life in both of those understandings of ‘setting’: environmental and verbal.

 

That would have come to very little, of course, without strong performances and staging. Nicholas Kok led the Manchester-based ensemble, Psappha in an incisive performance. It should perhaps come as no surprise that some of the most arresting instrumental writing should have been for clarinets (Dov Goldberg and Scott Lygate), given Simpson’s prowess as a clarinettist. The whole ensemble shone, though: positioned on stage as upstairs ‘band’: a Chorus of and for this world. The excellent set and costume designs of Leslie Travers and Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting contributed greatly to so much of what I have outlined above. This was a setting in which one could believe, in which Tim Albery’s direction of the singers made sense and came to life – and death.

 

Leslie Garrett’s portrayal of Val duly tugged at the heart strings. In the opening scene, I was a little unsure. Would occasional imperfections of intonation prove too much of a difficulty? Not at all: vocal and verbal sincerity, coupled with palpable dramatic identification entirely won me over. Steven Page’s Anna was worldly-wise, yes, but just as emotionally truthful’. Not for nothing had Simpson’s original ambition been to write an opera set amongst the drag queens of Liverpool. Brought to life just as powerfully, just as intelligently, were the romantic yearning – this was certainly not all youthful lust – of Nick Pritchard’s Matthew and the tragic bewilderment and predicament of Timothy Nelson’s Nathan. All four singers, it seemed, not only believed in their characters; they created and gave form to them before our eyes and ears. Such is the godlike business of art, as Hephaestus’s father – or at least his poetic creators – might have told us. So also might Anna in her ‘art of decay’, born, Challenger revealed, of the ‘brilliant spit-and-sawdust humour of Mancunian drag queen, Divine David’. PLEASURE. then, was spelled out to us, sometimes completely, sometimes in forlorn or aspirant fragments: not just scenically, but musico-dramatically too.

‘Do you think,’ Nathan asked Matthew, ‘it’s possible to separate yourself and become something different?’ Performance and work alike asked more questions than they could answer; such, after all, is the role of drama. However, the part of that question that relates to opera in general as well as to this specific opera was, in a sense, answered, as well as further questioned, by so fruitful a development of tradition.