Barbican Theatre
Coraline – Mary Bevan
Mother, Other Mother – Kitty WhatelyFather, Other Father – Alexander Robin Baker
Miss Spink, Ghost Child 1 – Gillian Keith
Miss Forcible – Frances McCafferty
Mr Bobo, Ghost Child 2 – Harry Nicoll
Ghost Child 3 – Dominic Sedgwick
Aletta Collins (director)
Giles Cadle (set designs)Gabrielle Dalton (costumes)
Matt Haskins (lighting)
Richard Wiseman, David Bruitland (magic consultants)
Britten Sinfonia
Sian Edwards (conductor)
This was not quite the
premiere: that had fallen two nights previously. In many ways, though, I was
very happy to be there for a more ‘ordinary’ performance: as it happened, a
Saturday matinee. For one thing, it was good to have a sense of how children
received Mark-Anthony Turnage’s fourth opera, expressly written for children, Coraline, and presented at the Barbican
by the Royal Opera. I was charmed, for instance, to hear in the bar beforehand,
an adult telling a child, perhaps his own, to remember that, ‘in the opera, we
listen; we don’t sing along.’ Whatever the rights and wrongs of that, to sense
a somewhat different audience excited about the prospect of a magical
theatrical occasion, rather than to hear Soprano X, in order to complain that
it was not Soprano Y, was refreshing enough.
Still more, perhaps, was the
behaviour of the audience, far better than that of the entitled bunches who
often fill our opera houses. They were not silent, but when the occasional
question was heard from another row, it was pertinent and genuinely added to
the experience. There was certainly none of the idle chatter that so often
detracts from a performance. That immediately leads to the caveat that this was
not necessarily intended for me at all: again a salutary lesson. Nevertheless,
I enjoyed the piece and found the objections I came up with on behalf of a
young audience – was it perhaps a little too long? – apparently confounded.
There was certainly no sign of such. We do well not to speak on behalf of
others, especially when they are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.
The opera is based upon a
children’s novella by Neil Gaiman, converted into an opera libretto by Rory
Mullarkey. I suspect the original and various adaptations – film, musical,
comic book, video game – will have been familiar to a good few of various ages
in the audience. Not to me, however, so I shall have to refrain from comparisons.
One of the things that struck me about the story as we encountered it here,
however, is how much it had in common with other children’s story tropes –
nothing wrong with that, for what piece of literature or theatre is unconnected
to anything else? – and yet also how one, or at least I, could appreciate it
for itself. Dissatisfaction with the mundanity of home and parents, escape to
an alternative life and ‘reality’ that promise everything and are thus clearly
too good to be true, and a renewed appreciation for what one has, allied to an
overcoming of personal fears, stand at the heart of the story. But so do ‘incidentals’:
curious neighbours, fun machines, body parts that operate on their own, and so
on. A world that is both close to ours and yet is not is created; an audience
experiences that creation and even, to a certain extent, reflects upon it. Drama
has always done that, and always will. The devil tends to be in the detail, and
here the detail seems to me good.
This is also opera, of course.
Turnage, operating within a broadly post-Stravinskian sound- and rhythm-world,
generally tonal, but not in any reactionary sense, gives no sense of
condescending to his audience. Indeed, like many composers, he seems perhaps to
be liberated by the particular requirements of the commission. (You may wish
for everything in the world, as the story tells us, but you do not necessarily
want it; nor will you necessarily get it.) Typical, yet far from stereotypical,
dance rhythms, propel an action that is not merely of the stage; so, too, do
different instrumental combinations and colours, different harmonies, different
tonal mises-en-scène, if you like.
This is not a score of the complexity of Moses
und Aron, but it is not trying to be, nor is there any reason why it should
be. After all, its subject matter is entirely different. It steers away from
the artifice of much opera; word-setting is rarely melismatic, although nor is
it always syllabic. Perhaps that is no bad thing for children. Whether or not,
however, they would have had a ‘problem’, with something with which they
suspect we might, that does not in itself dictate how a composer should write.
The history of opera, after all, is littered, often productively, with
aesthetic debates, even wars, in which composers, librettists, impresarios,
performers, audiences, theorists, and others have triumphed on both, or many,
sides. Such debates will often stimulate; they will never, however, offer more
than a provisional word on anything. Ask Richard Strauss.
With a splendid cast such as
this – all fine actors as well as fine singers, an ensemble in the very best
sense – combined with a fine orchestra and conductor, musical magic will nearly
always have opportunity to emerge: which I distinctly had the sense it did for
many in the audience, not all of them young. If I do not dwell on the performances
as such here, it is not intended as any disrespect; all were first-rate. But I
think it is sometimes, perhaps especially in a ‘children’s opera’, a good idea
to step back and to ask other questions too.
How, in any case, could anyone
truly dislike a show boasting a couple of ‘magic consultants’? A serious point
here, though: this, I think, would really have made a good introduction to many
children – perhaps not just to children – to the magic of the theatre. (Again,
I emphasise the caveat that, as a non-child, or at least far-too-overgrown
child, I may not be the best placed to see.) There are plenty of other options,
available, of course, but another one does no harm, indeed does good. Aletta Collins’s
staging does not shy away from showing that this is theatre, not television,
not film: we see what theatre can suggest, whereas more realistic media will
often (not always, I know) will find themselves merely portraying. Coraline
walks to another door in the building, and we see the set move around: no big
deal for us, nor perhaps for the children, but who knows? Lighting and costumes likewise take part in a degree of play between the realistic and something else. Moreover, I heard, in
the row behind me, an adult explaining at the curtain call, how it was that
there were fewer people on stage than there had been characters. The child
seemed both to understand and to sense some of that magic we can all too
readily for granted. Need it have been an opera, as I have heard some ask?
Maybe not. But why should it not have been? And what might come next? It is not
always ‘about us’. And perhaps we too have fears to overcome in terms of
surrender to the theatre, to opera, to art.
