Linbury Theatre
Ed Lyon (tenor)
Marie Hamard (mezzo-soprano)
Wim van der Grijn (actor)
Annelies van Gramberen, Naomi
Beeldens, Raphaële Green (semi-chorus)
Lada Valešová (piano, music
director)
Ivo van Hove (director)
Jan Versweyveld (set designs)
An d’Huys (costumes)
Krystian Lada (dramaturgy)
It is more than a decade since
I saw Muziektheater Transparant theatre piece, Wolpe!, at the Edinburgh Festival. Stefan
Wolpe had hitherto been little more than a name to me; that ‘staged concert’
immediately made him, his music, and his politics much more than than what I
see I went to far as to call an ‘inspiring event’.
Janáček is unlikely to require
such an introduction, at least, should such a thing exist, for a core audience,
though one can hardly call him and his music over-exposed. His song-cycle, The Diary of One who Disappeared, should
be far better known, or at least more frequently performed, than it is.
Language is doubtless an issue: if song performances in translation are not
unknown, they are decidedly uncommon, and Janáček loses so much in sound and
speech rhythm when translated that we should probably be grateful. Not that
there was any cause to regret the use of Czech here, at least to my untutored
ears. Ed Lyon’s command of the language seemed excellent, as did that of his
collaborators in song, Marie Hamard and offstage, female semi-chorus, Annelies
van Gramberen, Naomi Beeldens, and Raphaële Green. Lyon, Hamard, and pianist
and music director, Lada Valešová certainly proved vividly communicative throughout,
Lyon’s anguished, well-nigh televisually detailed stage presence chilling and
human indeed. (What a joy, as ever, it was to be in a smaller theatre where
such detail could register and be appreciated.)
There is, of course, nothing
remotely new about staging the cycle; the practice dates back to 1926, only
five years after the Brno premiere, in Laibach/Ljubljana. What matters is how
it is done. But this is not straightforwardly a staging of the cycle, although
it stands considerably closer to that than some such theatre pieces, seeking
less to tell another story than to tell a story that incorporates and, at a
remove, contextualises and interprets the work. Ivo van Hove’s production
presents a man, played by Wim van der Grijn, remembering his past: what might
have been and what was. Or does it? For it starts neither with him, nor with
Janáček’s male protagonist, but with a woman (Hamard), soon seated at a piano.
She does what she is told via a recording, until she does not, until she takes
on life of her own, her role at the piano quickly taken by Valešová. The man
takes his lead in the drama, at least partly – such is society, ours and Janáček’s
– and is joined by another, who seems to be his younger self. But the lines are
not precise: deliberately, I think. Whilst the obvious interpretation is –
well, obvious – it is not mandatory. There are alternatives, or at least
aspects one might fill in differently. And so, whilst that affair, presumably
long past, comes once again to life in his memory and leads the older man to
rueful regret or worse, the woman in a sense takes charge again, just as her
musical part and that of her semi-chorus are augmented by additional songs
composed by Annelies Van Parys (whom some English opera goers will recall from
her skilful
chamber reduction of Pelléas et Mélisande,
performed by English Touring Opera in 2015).
There is no question of the
significance of Kamila Stösslová for the cycle and its female character, Zefka,
or indeed, for Janáček as creator, vice
versa: ‘I do not have words to express my longing for you, to be close to
you,’ he wrote. ‘Wherever I am I think to myself: you cannot want anything else
in life, if you have this dear, cheerful, black little “gypsy girl”.’ Janáček
knew, he continued, ‘that my compositions will be more passionate, more
ravishing: you will sit on every little note in them. I shall caress them:
every little note will be your dark eye.’ The troubling exoticism of the idea
of the ‘dark … little gypsy girl’ is, to an extent, jettisoned or at least
addressed, with an element of reclamation. (Or should we consider it cultural
appropriation? These things are never straightforward, nor should they be – and
it is hardly for me to say.) Zefka, insofar as it is she, sings songs, which
move between idioms more and considerably less related to Janáček’s, which look
upon her former, gadjo (non-Roma) lover
from her, Roma standpoint. Having had her say, though, she cedes the stage to
the older man, who reads from the composer’s celebrated letters to Stösslová,
burning them as he would – as he did. Is it so straightforward as the man being
revealed as Janáček? I do not think so, though someone could reasonably take
that line. Memory is a complex thing: how it haunts us, what it includes,
excludes, edits. So too is theatre, at least as a similarly active experience. There
is clearly, though, something of the composer in the man we see on stage,
embittered, and perhaps facing some degree of justice for his actions, albeit in
a setting contemporary or at least closer to us. We too must decide what it is
we have seen and heard, relate it as we will or must.
It is a far more interesting,
far more finished, piece of work than Richard Jones’s recent, lacklustre Katya Kabanova
for the main stage (Jones’s production, that is, rather than the excellent musical
performances it attracted). At the same time, it remains, like much
contemporary theatre in general, and much contemporary operatic theatre in
particular, fruitfully open-ended. I continue to think about it; I suspect that,
should you see it, you will too.
