ENO's "Idomeneo", or, how to c*ck up a really good idea.

“Idomeneo”.

Not that young chap Mozart’s finest hour, but lovely stuff nonetheless. ENO field a terrific cast and a very odd production, and I come out at the end feeling wildly frustrated. The production is almost worse than a downright ropey one would have been, because it is very nearly superb, but fluffs it totally by continuously restating its cleverest ideas, over and over like a nervous tic, until one wants to shake the director.

The basic idea of relocating the action to the contemporary corporate/political world is a good one. The device of the lover’s debate/duet being sung during a formal meal was interesting, first time around; it neatly pointed up the misery of having to hide your feelings in public, of being a Public Face and not able to have messy things like emotions visible - much less allow them to affect one's behaviour, when Duty has to come first. The device of having besuited corporate functionaries hurrying about the stage with clipboards was effective, for about a scene.

But as the repetition of these ideas - endless successions of waiters bustling, endless pacing Suits in noisy shoes - goes on it becomes first irritating, then distracting and finally infuriating, and I begin wanting to shout “No more bl**dy waiters, please!” It isn’t until the third Act that the constant stage business, and busyness, calms down enough to let the music and the performers carry the piece properly.

This is particularly rough when, in the amazing Paul Nilon, and in Robert Murray, Sarah Tynan and Emma Bell, the ENO have four principals who can handle every delicate nuance of their music, every lovely phrase and fancy frill, and who also act their socks off. It seems almost mean of Katie Mitchell to have surrounded them with endless fussy distractions on stage, rather than setting things up and then having the confidence in her concept and in the piece itself to let these great acting singers - and the orchestra, in excellent form as usual – just take it from there.

It was also unwise, I felt, to make so much of a figure of fun out of Electra; being the unwanted one in a love triangle is hell, as I can vouch - it is not funny at all. Hell for the participant, and boring for their friends, but funny? - no. Besides, it means you have the comic relief committing suicide at the end, and that's a big jump for the audience to make.

On a different note, I'm really sorry to learn that Nicholas Mahut lost – finally – his protracted battle with the Human Barn Door Isner at Wimbledon. It seems bizarre that I watched the first part of this match on Tuesday after work, and they have only just finished playing now. But to me it looked, at least on Tuesday, as if the underlying battle was that old cliché, David and Goliath, aka brains versus brawn; and I’m afraid in that situation I am firmly on the side of brains. Call it intellectual snobbery. Besides, Mahut looks like an elf. Intellectual snobbery with a side-preference for elvish men, then...

Going home now, to reheat the rest of that curry, and get back to my drawing.

"Wozzeck"

I went to “Wozzeck” last night. Oh God. Oh God oh God.

Don’t get me wrong; Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” is a brilliant opera. Brilliant. It is one of the great fusions of music and drama – dissonant, atonal music is the perfect medium for a story of this nature. But it is so utterly, unremittingly bleak and harrowing. I am an optimistic person with an imperfect but very happy and busy life, and I came out of the RFH last night feeling as if I lived at the bottom of a mine and had never seen daylight or breathed fresh air. It was that good – ie, that shatteringly upsetting – a performance. I doubt if I can ever face it again, though.

I was once in a production of Buchner’s “Woycek”, the original play on which “Wozzeck” is based. This is also deeply bleak, yet it was one of the happiest productions I was ever involved with. The director had decided to do a Shared Experience-style ensemble production. Normally amateur drama is very straightforward; the actors learn the lines and do the acting, the backstage people move the scenery and do the lights, and so forth. Whereas this was all team work and Improv and theatre games and actors’ exercises, and crouching on the ground making odd noises, and actors being scenery, and me singing (the final mad touch – I do have a deep voice but I do not sound like Yanka Rupkina – just marginally more like her than anyone else in the company).

Working on it was fun, and stimulating, and by the end of the run had resulted in a very closely-knit team, with none of the usual stratifications of a conventional production. I suppose it was that which enabled us all to get so much enjoyment out of performing a play about a basically decent man trapped by his social circumstances in a crushingly impoverished life, bullied and humiliated by everyone around him, who eventually goes insane and murders his common-law wife because she is the only person at whom he can lash out.

When you add Berg’s music to this tragic and profoundly nihilistic story, you push up the emotional impact by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Favourite Baritone did himself proud in the lead, his human-scale, slightly husky voice and deeply inward acting style perfect for this character. Katarina Dalayman was a beautiful and sumptuous-sounding Marie. The Drum Major sounded good although he didn’t look the part (for my tastes – skinny and balding do not a hunk make; sorry, folks). Robert Murray was a lovely Andres; I am more and more impressed with him each time I see him in action.

It was semi-staged, which I hadn’t expected. The singers were costumed; they came and went, clutching chairs and props, in the narrow bit of platform in front of the orchestra. Immediately behind them, indifferent and passionate as an army of recording angels, the Philharmonia tore through the wrenchingly powerful and difficult music as if it were no harder than a nice orchestration of Chopin. Esa-Pekka Salonen leapt about his rostrum in a pool of light like a heavenly glow, while at his feet Wozzeck was beaten and broken and driven to his crime and his pathetic death. The contrast between the divine focus of the musicians and the torment of the protagonists was so intense it added an extra dimension to the tragedy. By the time it finished I don’t think I had breathed normally for at least thirty minutes, I was so swept up in the pain and the tension, so carried beyond myself by the brilliant, terrifying music.

It was great. Honestly. Just very, very depressing.

Monday...

...and a bad dose of that Monday-feeling.

I've decided to bite the bullet - I need to move away from the place I'm living at the moment - and I've started looking for somewhere new. I hate house-hunting, and the bizarre experiences I had eighteen months ago when I had to move at short notice were fairly traumatic, which only adds to the sense of doom and dread. If anyone reading this is thinking of letting their spare room or knows someone who is renting out a room in the Ealing, Acton, or Turnham Green areas, or in Richmond upon Thames or Mortlake, please let me know!

On the good side, saw the wonderful ENO production of "The Magic Flute" at the weekend, and was totally knocked out and blown away by it. It's perfect, everything a "Zauberflöte" should be - and since it is one of my all-time favourite operas that is saying something! Their only problem is a rather dodgy, swoopy Queen of Night; but to compensate they have a truly marvellous Papageno (better than Keenlyside, believe it or not) in Roderick Williams. I could burble for ages about how wonderful he was, and about the whole production, which is magical and fairy-tale-like and yet profoundly moving. The trials by fire and water are really believable for once - I think every other production I've seen (including the first, at my elder brother's school!) has come a cropper with staging this bit. The sets and costumes are lovely. It's extremely funny in all the right places, yet brings up goosebumps of real awe in all the right places, too. The Tamino and Pamina (Robert Murray and Sarah-Jane Davis) are both excellent. I cried with joy at the end. And Roderick Williams is, I repeat, wonderful. And decidedly gorgeous!

How incredible it must be, to have talent like that; a voice like warm dark honey and that kind of acting ability, plus good looks, and then on top of all that to possess the strength of character to realise your abilities and make full use of them... Lucky, happy Mr Williams...

On a more creativity-inclined note, I'm startled and rather proud to announce that I have I think finished the last revision of GY; and promptly got stuck in to typing up something else, an older piece of writing that is in need of some serious revision itself but stands up well to the re-examination. Title, "Ramundi's Sisters". Watch this space.