Young Vic; Barbican; Royal Academy of Music, all London
Bare all, share all. This is the message in the House of Ulysses, as revealed in the latest collaborative fusion between English National Opera and the Young Vic. The hero, back home from one of those journeys from hell lasting 10 years and involving epic encounters with one-eyed giants and lotus-eaters, strips off and takes a power shower. This redemptive cleansing, nearly the final visual coup in Benedict Andrews's staging of Monteverdi's The Return of Ulysses ? and despite some clever lighting leaving little to the imagination in case you wondered ? comes after an accumulation of domestic activity: peeing, getting dressed, dealing with the aftermath of a massacre and cooking an omelette, not necessarily in that order
In the intimacy of the Young Vic, a venue which seems to have a special gift of reining in and sharpening the more sprawlingly proportioned ENO, this had urgent, if doubtless to many irritating, impact. Andrews, an Australian theatre director, achieves shock impact by assaulting the senses, especially the visual. The use of big screens, as here projecting real-time close-ups, is already an operatic cliche which fights with the action and is best ignored. Stillness is an alien notion. Why stand on the spot to deliver your big, sensuous, ornamented aria when you could run, thrust your groin or, in one case, take your knickers off?
That said, and despite a mild impression of yet another director thinking powdery old opera needs pepping up, it worked, though I doubt for everyone. This is a powerful, muscular, "hey, count the hours we spend in the gym" kind of show. Lingering reservations are blown away by the grit and intense energy of the performance. Conducted from the harpsichord by the brilliant Jonathan Cohen, the small ensemble of ENO and specialist theorbo, lirone and harp players made this music shimmer and blaze.
The cast combined experienced ENO regulars, including Diana Montague as the nurse and Nigel Robson as Eumete, with newer talent (notably Thomas Hobbs as Telemaco, Ruby Hughes as Minerva) to gripping and traumatic effect. As the grieving Penelope, Pamela Helen Stephen was remarkable; all too credible in her exploration of loss, bold in physicality. She overcame occasional vocal weakness with a mesmerising, uninhibited performance. Her revealing dresses and teetering five-inch heels provoked no evident self-consciousness, despite being hugely shown on screen.
When her cheap-suited suitors (all well sung) throw coloured confetti over her, she looks terrorised, as if tarred with feathers. This is one of many striking images, together with helium balloons, child puppet, grotesque clown mask and an upturned flour bag, in Bork�r J�nssons' designs, lit by Jon Clark. Tom Randle, in wonderfully flexible voice as Ulysses, communicates with emotional directness. Restored to royal power in a sharp suit, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Barack Obama. Power, war fatigue and gun crime feature discomfortingly in this updating, set in a revolving glass house sleek with Mies van der Rohe leather and chrome, sickly with bowls of white lilies. It's a concept, yes. Yet it speaks with clarity.
The same cannot be said of Peter Brook's free adaptation of Die Zauberfl�te, here called A Magic Flute. At 86, with 60 years of invention behind him, Brook's work at the Th��tre des bouffes du Nord in Pars is reaching a close with this cuisine minceur version of Mozart. The empty stage, dreadlocks, long poles and jagged storytelling are familiar and often beautiful Brook traits, seen in 11 and 12 last year. Is this Flute opera or theatre? Is it an introduction to or a dissection of Mozart's original? I can find no way of answering these questions except in the negative. This difficult but enchanting late masterpiece has been reduced to marionette stiffness, its earthiness cleansed, its music parched to desiccation.
The act of reduction is not in itself a problem, or a blasphemy. Brook's The Tragedy of Carmen took liberties with Bizet to brilliant effect. But if you remove, so must you add. Seven singers and two actors give a "lite" account of the plot. Franck Krawczyk played his piano score, a monochrome tutti frutti of Mozartian keyboard effect, elegantly enough in a corner with the lid down. It had all the tinkling hush of a clavichord, the instrument Handel used to play at night when his family was asleep. It gave no hint of the grandeur or scope of Mozart's operatic genius.
In the dry acoustic of the Barbican theatre the voices sounded pinched. The other cast may have been better. Antonio Figueroa's Tamino had a good, virile purity. Papageno (Virgile Frannais) managed to raise smiles. The character of the Queen of the Night became, if you can believe it, quite normal. At the end, and in a single moment of magic, actor Abdou Ouloguem cleverly lost his flute. I had already lost marbles, patience and the will to live.
The wasted evening might have been better spent on a second visit to Peter Maxwell Davies's enthralling Kommilitonen! (Young Blood), given its world premiere at the Royal Academy of Music in a crisp production by David Pountney, who wrote the libretto, incisively conducted by Jane Glover, the college's director of opera. The three-stranded plot entwines stories of student unrest in wartime Germany, Maoist China and civil rights in America, mirrored by stylistic distinctions in the music.
With a large cast, onstage marching band, jazz trio and Chinese erhu player, it lent itself to student performance but also deserves, if ever practicable, a wider audience. How satisfying to have a full-scale opera written with the fluency of a composer who, at 76 and with several early theatre works to his name, understands the stage. Pastiche is skilful and immediate, only the showy top strata of a many layered and subtle score.
Each singer (I saw the second cast) deserves credit. It would be invidious, given the work's ensemble character, to single any out. Did it matter that James Meredith, the activist specifically famous for being black, had to be played by a white singer? No, inasmuch as the story carries meaning for the human rights of all mankind, and no in that it was right to draw from the student talent available rather than import. It must have been a tricky question to resolve. But this bold adventure, a co-commission between the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard School, New York, has paid off.
With bad timing, Kommilitonen!'s first night clashed with the UK premiere of Up-Close for cello, string orchestra and film by the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa. Cellist Sol Gabetta and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta played the evocative, lyrical score, which made atmospheric use of electronics, at one side of the stage. On the other, a silent film of an older woman running through woods to an empty house offered a puzzling narrative. Gabetta and woman at times echoed each other. Eventually they find the same old-fashioned standard lamp and, as it were, everything is illuminated.
It was a richly intriguing affair, the sort of thing that sounds dreadful and pretentious when described ? words which could more aptly be applied to Pierre Audi's "staging" of Berg's Lyric Suite in the first half. My inability precisely to say how Up-Close's recipe of resonance and mystery worked is itself a form of praise.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/27/return-ulysses-magic-flute-kommilitonen-up-close
Portia de Rossi Jolene Blalock Nichole Robinson Monet Mazur Rozonda Thomas
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