Note: A review of the performance on Sunday 24th June 2018.
Oddly enough, given my many years of opera going, I'd only seen this
repertory staple once before, a Royal Opera House revival something
like six years ago. It hadn't particularly stuck in my memory.
Consequently, I was surprised by the power of this revisiting,
especially the disturbing contemporary parallels.
I had forgotten, in the intervening time, just how bleak a portrait
of the United States and its imperial tendencies this opera is. Part
of the power comes musically from the interweaving of the Star
Spangled Banner – which feels satirical. Part of it, in this
production, comes from the film sequence (by Ian William Galloway)
inflicted on the line of Japanese brides in Act 1 – looking at the
Statue of Liberty on screen I found it impossible not to think of the
mockery of that symbol by the current administration. But the text
itself is filled with a sense of troubling, dangerous American
arrogance – from Pinkerton's casual, careless attitude to his
marriage at the beginning through to Kate Pinkerton's “We still get
the child?” line at the end – a moment which again, in light of
the events in the States in the past week, has a real horror.
Saturday, 30 June 2018
Sunday, 24 June 2018
Reflections on an Accidental US Race Relations Double Bill
Last Saturday I spent the day
seeing two new works on the theme of American race relations –
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's deconstruction of Dion Boucicault's The
Octoroon (transferred to the
NT's Dorfman from the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond) and Anna Deavere
Smith's one woman show Notes from the Field, playing the Royal Court
as part of LIFT 2018. The accidental
comparison proved
instructive.
Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon starts unpromisingly. An actor (Ken Nwosu) playing the playwright comes on and proceeds to detail his problems in writing the play. While the author does have a fresh angle on this (the particular challenges of being, or trying to be, a black playwright) this didn't finally justify the reuse of what is, as far as I'm concerned, an over familiar and ineffective device – that is the device of worrying to the audience about how to start the play – (most recently in evidence at the start of The Inheritance). Why contemporary playwrights so often show this aversion to just getting on and telling the story escapes me.
Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon starts unpromisingly. An actor (Ken Nwosu) playing the playwright comes on and proceeds to detail his problems in writing the play. While the author does have a fresh angle on this (the particular challenges of being, or trying to be, a black playwright) this didn't finally justify the reuse of what is, as far as I'm concerned, an over familiar and ineffective device – that is the device of worrying to the audience about how to start the play – (most recently in evidence at the start of The Inheritance). Why contemporary playwrights so often show this aversion to just getting on and telling the story escapes me.
Saturday, 23 June 2018
Aldeburgh Festival 2018, or, Notes from the Opening Weekend
Note:
A belated report on performances over the weekend of 8th-10th
July 2018.
A visit to the
Aldeburgh Festival has become a regular fixture in my summer
calendar. On this occasion I was especially looking forward to
hearing John Wilson's partnership with the BBC Scottish Symphony
Orchestra, and finally, hearing his own Orchestra live. I also caught
the new opera by Emma Howard.
The best of the
weekend was to be found in the two orchestral concerts on Friday and
Saturday evenings, marrying up, with one exception, a set of works by
Britten and American composers written in 1940-1 or (in the case of
the Grimes Sea Interludes soon afterwards). These couplings brought
out striking connections in musical language, affording the
opportunity to hear afresh the Sea Interludes in particular.
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