29/8/09, Festival Theatre (Edinburgh Festival)
3 hrs 45 mins. Handel's opera in a production for the Gottingen Festival directed by Doris Dorrie, who is apparently a well-known German novelist and film-maker and (these days) opera director, conducted from the harpsichord by Nicholas McGegan with around 30 musicians ranged all round him in the Festival Theatre's shallow pit.
Sheep, deer, naked dancers, Japanese costumes, shadow play, lighting that threw washes of colour over a white stage with black cloth wings: visually ravishing.
Admeto is dying. His wife Alceste volunteers to die in his place. He recovers and sends Ercole (Hercules) to bring her back from the Underworld. Meanwhile Antigona, who is loved by Admeto's brother Trasimede, makes a play for Admeto and he finds himself torn between love for her and for Alceste. Alceste returns in disguise, there is a predictable mix-up, until all is resolved and Antigona is paired up with T.
The singing had its ups and downs. Tim Mead as Admeto had the most beautiful counter-tenor; David Bates as Trasimede sounded totally out of his depth. Kirsten Blaise as the naughty temptress Antigona was a fine singer and entertaining actor (slapping away at her spurned lover Trasimede's horizontal sword as it rose towards the perpendicular while he sang "a ha ha"). Marie Arnet as Alceste had a lovely voice but lacked power (from where I sat somewhere round to the side at the front of the circle). Her dying aria was especially beautiful, sung in a huge white kimono, before she went behind a screen to expire; it rose to reveal spreading blood, represented by a red carpet gradually pulled outwards across the stage, and her spirit rising slowly from her body.
The spirt in question was the veteran butoh dancer Tadashi Endo, in long wig and white weeds, who also supplied the choreography. I'm beginning to get the hang of butoh, which seems to involve a lot of stylised and grotesque movement, white body paint, few if any clothes and much grimacing. This is the Wikipedia definition: "It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally "performed" in white-body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion, with or without an audience. But there is no set style, and it may be purely conceptual with no movement at all."
At the very start the ten dancers played furies, tormenting the dying Admeto: they looked for all the world like a bunch of Gollums. Later they attacked Hercules (William Berger, dressed in a fat suit to resemble a sumo wrestler) as he freed Alceste from Hell: he shouldered them, threw them and bellied them aside. Then he was tempted by naked dancers, thrusting them too aside with superhuman effort. Before that we'd seen them dressed as sheep in silly woolly costumes accompanying Antigona, a princess masquerading (for reasons never made clear) as a shepherdess. Later they played deer in a hunting scene, the men with magnificent antlers on their heads.
At the end of Act 1 I decided this production was definitely camp, but respectful, and the Japanese setting was plausible.
In Act 2 Admeto laments that he loves two women while two dancers, one dressed in white and one in black, drift across the stage behind him: they used at this point the whole stage, right to the back, and very impressive it is too, reputedly the largest in Britain. The act ends with showpiece arias for the two sopranos; Alceste's is accompanied by half a dozen naked dancers in see-through chiffon kimonos tempting him/her (for she is now dressed as a samurai warrior). That seemed inappropriate since what she is singing has to do with discovering whether he husband (not she) is faithful or not; but maybe the director's aim was just to plant a suggstion of "temptation" generally.
Act 3 concludes with a solo dance for Alceste's spirit. I never felt the production fully integrated the spirit (unlike the rest of the dancers, who were fine). Before that there was an ensemble song, and before that a beautiful duet for Admeto and Alceste as the lovers are reconciled; but it was undermined by some silly business as Trasimede flits around surreptitiously with a drawn sword plotting to murder his brother.
This was also the only act in which the prevailing Japanese aesthetic was undermined for some reason with European baroque elements: a painted backdrop of a garden, then two drops of baroque palace interiors with windows and arched doorways. They flew up suddenly and disappeared just before the triumphal conclusion. I couldn't see the point, though one reviewer suggested it may have been a way of highlighting the forced, artificial, "stagey" nature of the proceedings at this point.
Plausibility, as so often, wasn't one of the librettist's strong points. Antigona has been obsessively in love throughout with Admeto, at one stage wrapping herself in a giant cloth portrait of him hanging from the flies (she is dressed only in a black swimsuit affair at this point). At the very end she is suddenly, instantly persuaded to switch her affections to Trasimede, the man she has energetically spurned throughout. Bizarre.
It was a delight, after a succession of 50 minute fringe productions, to have something really meaty and substantial to get one's teeth into.
Showing posts with label festival theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label festival theatre. Show all posts
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Sunday, 16 August 2009
ST KILDA: ISLAND OF THE BIRDMEN
15/8/09, Festival Theatre (Edinburgh International Festival)
1hr 30 mins. Described as "an opera in three acts", performed in Gaelic, French and English (though I thought I caught snatches of Flemish as well), with choir, acrobats, aerialists, extensive video inserts and a five-strong band (piano, cello, trombone, accordion, percussion, plus conductor).
It had two composers (David P Graham, born in Stratford, based in Germany for Act I; Jean-Paul Dessy, Belgian, who also conducted, for Acts II and II). The original concept was by a Frenchman. The writer (Iain Finlay Macleod) was from Lewis; the choreographer (Juha-Pekka Marsalo) from Finland; the director (Thierry Poquet) from France. The two leading on-stage performers were a francophone Belgian (Alain Eloy) as a narrator speaking accented English and a singer (Alyth McCormack) from Lewis who sang Gaelic songs in a beautiful, high, bell-like voice.
The film, directed by Finlay Macleod and Poquet, featured an all-Scottish cast with "cliff dancers" from the Compagnie Retouramont, which sounds Belgian or French (presumably French: do they have cliffs in Belgium?).
The programme lists four co-producers (all francophone organisations) "in partnership with" the Gaelic Arts Agency and two French (?) organisations, "with the participation of" an Italian outfit, "and the support of" two French regional arts bodies.
A spectacular Europudding in other words, and like so many Europuddings it ended up an ambitious, intriguing but ultimately disappointing mish-mash, less than the sum of its parts.
The starting point was the island of St Kilda, abandoned by its people in the 1930s. Some of the best bits were the film clips shot at the time of a primitive, isolated community, swaddled in tweed against the Atlantic winds, whose economy revolved around birds. There was a story of sorts: a young couple; he goes off with others bird-hunting to a nearby island; the boat slips its knot and they are stranded for some days, perhaps many; when a rescue boat arrives he falls to his death from the cliff. But I would not have known that unless I'd read the synopsis.
The story is told simultaneously by the narrator and the singers on stage; on video; and by the activities of the aerialists, both on stage and (rather breathtaking this) on the cliffs of St Kilda itself.
The music was spiky but inoffensive. At the end the musicians joined the exodus, abandoning their instruments to walk up on stage and into the wings, leaving the cellist alone to reach a dying fall. My chief objections: every time Alyth McCormack came on, singing a Gaelic lament unaccompanied, after a few stanzas the band would strike up with something which seemed to come from a quite different sound world and gradually drowned her out; and the dirge-like quality of much of the music made it hard to stay awake (we were tired: we'd only just arrived from London).
The singing and narration were amplified. The stage was bare but for one huge screen at the back and another, smaller one hanging to one side of the proscenium. There were occasional moments of visual beauty: a woman in a white dress swinging from a rope from side to side; two aerialists behind a great plastic sheet, swinging into and away from it, like great sea birds on the cliff face (the sheet fell to the floor when they'd finished and was later rolled up and carried by the cast to the front of the stage, like a giant version of the bundles the islanders carried when they finally left).
The audience seemed appreciative, except for one couple just in front of us who chose to leave just as the islanders were preparing to do the same, the video screens showing pictures of the book of Exodus in a Gaelic bible.
At the end I was left wondering what the point was: a powerful story, and powerful imagery and powerful Gaelic music, muddied and obscured by the modern musical overlay and Belgian touches.
1hr 30 mins. Described as "an opera in three acts", performed in Gaelic, French and English (though I thought I caught snatches of Flemish as well), with choir, acrobats, aerialists, extensive video inserts and a five-strong band (piano, cello, trombone, accordion, percussion, plus conductor).
It had two composers (David P Graham, born in Stratford, based in Germany for Act I; Jean-Paul Dessy, Belgian, who also conducted, for Acts II and II). The original concept was by a Frenchman. The writer (Iain Finlay Macleod) was from Lewis; the choreographer (Juha-Pekka Marsalo) from Finland; the director (Thierry Poquet) from France. The two leading on-stage performers were a francophone Belgian (Alain Eloy) as a narrator speaking accented English and a singer (Alyth McCormack) from Lewis who sang Gaelic songs in a beautiful, high, bell-like voice.
The film, directed by Finlay Macleod and Poquet, featured an all-Scottish cast with "cliff dancers" from the Compagnie Retouramont, which sounds Belgian or French (presumably French: do they have cliffs in Belgium?).
The programme lists four co-producers (all francophone organisations) "in partnership with" the Gaelic Arts Agency and two French (?) organisations, "with the participation of" an Italian outfit, "and the support of" two French regional arts bodies.
A spectacular Europudding in other words, and like so many Europuddings it ended up an ambitious, intriguing but ultimately disappointing mish-mash, less than the sum of its parts.
The starting point was the island of St Kilda, abandoned by its people in the 1930s. Some of the best bits were the film clips shot at the time of a primitive, isolated community, swaddled in tweed against the Atlantic winds, whose economy revolved around birds. There was a story of sorts: a young couple; he goes off with others bird-hunting to a nearby island; the boat slips its knot and they are stranded for some days, perhaps many; when a rescue boat arrives he falls to his death from the cliff. But I would not have known that unless I'd read the synopsis.
The story is told simultaneously by the narrator and the singers on stage; on video; and by the activities of the aerialists, both on stage and (rather breathtaking this) on the cliffs of St Kilda itself.
The music was spiky but inoffensive. At the end the musicians joined the exodus, abandoning their instruments to walk up on stage and into the wings, leaving the cellist alone to reach a dying fall. My chief objections: every time Alyth McCormack came on, singing a Gaelic lament unaccompanied, after a few stanzas the band would strike up with something which seemed to come from a quite different sound world and gradually drowned her out; and the dirge-like quality of much of the music made it hard to stay awake (we were tired: we'd only just arrived from London).
The singing and narration were amplified. The stage was bare but for one huge screen at the back and another, smaller one hanging to one side of the proscenium. There were occasional moments of visual beauty: a woman in a white dress swinging from a rope from side to side; two aerialists behind a great plastic sheet, swinging into and away from it, like great sea birds on the cliff face (the sheet fell to the floor when they'd finished and was later rolled up and carried by the cast to the front of the stage, like a giant version of the bundles the islanders carried when they finally left).
The audience seemed appreciative, except for one couple just in front of us who chose to leave just as the islanders were preparing to do the same, the video screens showing pictures of the book of Exodus in a Gaelic bible.
At the end I was left wondering what the point was: a powerful story, and powerful imagery and powerful Gaelic music, muddied and obscured by the modern musical overlay and Belgian touches.
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