Section:GDN 12 PaGe:13 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 16:22 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian
Thursday 29 August 2019 13
Live reviews
PHOTOGRAPHS: ROBERT WORKMAN ; KIRSTEN MCTERNAN; ALECSANDRA RALUCA DRAGOI
Nevertheless, Grace Nyandoro
as Treemonisha was a sweetly
reluctant heroine, all hand-wringing
and lip-pursing, her soprano
metallic and hyper-focused, as she
survives abduction to demonstrate
the value of education. Caroline
Modiba made a classy turn as her
friend Lucy, her mezzo even and
beautifully creamy. As her parents,
Rodney Earl Clarke and Samantha
Houston were dramatically eff ective.
Tenor Edwin Cotton’s hero Remus
was energetic if strained in the
higher reaches, while Njabulo
Madlala’s Zodzetrick boasted vocal
weight that was lacking elsewhere
and made for a persuasive villain.
The best of the lot was the four-
piece chorus. Their voices blended
seamlessly and they danced with
utter commitment, breathing life
into Cecilia Stinton’s economical
production and Joplin’s often
pedestrian libretto – and off ering
a glimpse of how vibrant the opera
might be if staged on a grander scale.
Flora Willson★★★☆☆
Summerhall, EdinburghAt Theatr Clwyd, Mold, from3-4 September Opera
Treemonisha
Comedy
Simon Munnery
T
he year 1911 was
a vintage one for
opera. Bartók
composed Bluebeard’s
Castle , Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier
and Ravel’s L’ Heure Espagnole
made their debuts. All three are now
repertory fi xtures. The same can’t be
said for Treemonisha, another work
that premiered in 1911 and one of the
rarities at this year’s ever-resourceful
Grimeborn, a musical theatre and
opera festival in east London.
This three-acter is by Scott Joplin,
the self-styled king of ragtime , and itwas his second attempt in the genre.
He called his fi rst a ragtime opera ,
and its score is sadly lost , but in
Treemonisha, Joplin wanted to
show his credentials as a serious
composer in a European vein,
even writing his own libretto
in a gesture to Richard Wagner.
Treemonisha is a long way from
Bayreuth. Its touches of Wagnerian
harmony mingle with middle-
period Verdi, perhaps a dash of
Schubert, plenty of Tin Pan Alley and
explosions of ragtime. In the Spectra
Ensemble ’s reduction for Grimeborn,
we get none of the symphonic heft
Joplin was so keen to exploit. But
there were excellent performances
by the six musicians, led by fl autist
and music director Matthew Lynch.
Berginald Rash’s clarinet playing was
especially stylish.
The singing was mixed.
Joplin’s solo lines are surprisingly
angular and, aside from a few
strophic numbers, often bitty- hard to pull off without more
luxurious orchestral support.
T
he last time Simon
Munnery was doing
his Alan Parker
character, the issues of
the day were the poll
tax, the rainforests and
Margaret Thatcher. Now the “bedsit
anarchist” is back. The world has
changed, but has he?
His old jokes about the DHSS, the
Birmingham Six and the Thatcher
years rub shoulders with material
about feminism and climate change.
He’s so into Extinction Rebellion
that he has a graph of CO2 emissions
drawn on his bomber jacket.
However, his attempts to be a good
feminist only betray him as being a
very bad one.Whatever the issue, his “radical
solutions to radical problems” are
utter nonsense, like blowing on
the world to cool it down. And here
lies the purpose of Parker. He isn’t
a surgical satire of the loony left. It’s
too surreal, and Munnery probably
shares too much of his politics.
Instead, Parker has clearly been
created (and revived) with aff ection.
He’s the Watford boy who thinks big
but lives small. In the tradition of
British comedy characters, he has
delusions of grandeur. If anything,
Munnery seems to most enjoylampooning the tone of protest : the
voice heavy with piety, the impotent
sloganeering, “ambiguity” written on
his hi-vis jacket.
In this era of political crisis and
140- character Twitter take downs,
Parker might lack punch. Even so,
there is something wonderfully
appealing about a character in his 50s
who still has the fi re, and still wants
to change the world – even if he’s the
least-equipped person to do it.
This is all in keeping with Munnery
as a comic: absurdist and playful,
if a bit non committal. He’s also a
gagsmith, and there are a handful of
terrifi c jokes, like his take on the evils
of (Billy Bragg voice) tech-nol-ogy.
And he doesn’t waste the opportunity
to dig out his old and still funny cover
of the Orb’s Little Fluff y Clouds.
One slightly off -colour moment is a
routine that, in tone at least, is a dig
about self-identifi cation.
Parker signs off with his 10 radical
commandments, which are printed
on a tea towel he’s fl ogging for a fi ver.
It’s a slyly funny way of saying that,
for him, the struggle goes on.
Paul FleckneyProms
Harding/
Widmann
T
heatre is a laboratory
where we put a
character centre
stage, make things
diffi cult and see
what happens.
Often, as is the case in Si ân Owen’s
single-hander for Dirty Protest
theatre company, they go off the
rails. Put under pressure, the
fi ght-or-fl ight mechanism kicks
in and running seems the most
viable option.
Thus it is for Laura Dalgleish’s
Katie, a single mum relying on
the hospitality of her mother
while her young daughter faces
a perilous operation. It’s not only
the little girl who needs to be
brave. Indeed, the greater pressure
is on Katie, whose adult status
means she knows the risks and
carr ies the responsibility. How
can she be brave when she feels
such an intense combination of
guilt – however unwarranted- and helplessness?
Instead of facing up to it, she
snaps. Leaving her mother’s
house on an impulse, the 35-year-
old hits the streets of her home
town of Newport. She goes
on a journey that is as much
about her formative childhood
experiences, when she too
had to be brave, as it is about
the modern-day locale where
old scores have been settled yet
old wounds remain.
As a woman delving into
her soul on a stolen BMX,
Dalgleish gives an impassioned
performance. She perfectly
catches the agony of a woman
who needs to come to terms with
her own vulnerabilities before
fi nding the strength to tend to
someone else.
In Catherine Paskell’s bright
and uncluttered production,
she is forever making a break for
the exits and forever being pulled
back to face her demons. If it is
dramatically limited as a play,
Dalgleish’s performance is alive
with energy and empathy.
Mark Fisher
★★★☆☆
Arcola, LondonUntil Sunday★★★☆☆
The Stand, Edinburgh★★★☆☆
Royal Albert Hall, LondonJ
örg Widmann ’s opera
Babylon, a bombastic,
Stockhausen-baiting
mix of myth, spirituality,
human sacrifi ce and
singing genitalia, had its
premiere in Munich seven years ago.
It has yet to be staged in the UK; we
have to make do with his Babylon
Suite, already heard in Cardiff and
Birmingham. This performance
by the Orchestre de Paris and its
outgoing music director, Daniel
Harding , was its fi rst in London.
It’s a barnstormer of a piece,
wheeling through music from the
opera in an unbroken 30-minute
work for a huge kitchen-sink
orchestra but no singers. Initially,
the music grows swiftly from a single
accordion line into a layered, chaotic
whirl. It’s the kind of opening passage
that promises cataclysm – and that’s
what we get, although not in the
brutal way we might anticipate.
Instead, things get progressively
more tuneful: fi rst a glimpse of
soupy Rachmaninov, then an impish,
Straussian solo violin, a klezmer-
style waltz and an oompah band
playing Oktoberfest songs. By this
time, the Widmann prism distorting
this melody has all but dissolved, and
towards the end the waltz returns.
Taken out of the context of the
opera, it is a baffl ing piece; but it’s
archly anarchic and infectiously fun,
the work of a virtuoso composer
clearly enjoying himself. The Paris
players were enjoying it, too.
There was also much geniality in
the works that framed the Widmann,
from the tenderly shaped lines of
Schumann’s Genoveva overture to
the thanksgiving music at the end of
a careful performance of Beethoven’s
Symphony No 6. The orchestral
sound was pristine and beautifully
blended, almost to a fault. Harding
is leaving one French organisation
in good shape; next year he’ll join
another – a qualifi ed pilot, he’s
planning to take a sabbatical to work
for Air France. But while neatness
and precision may be exactly what
we want from the person fl ying our
plane, this Beethoven could have
used a little bit of turbulence.
Erica JealTheatre
How to Be Brave
Baffl ing but fun
... Jörg WidmannSoul-searching
BMX odyssey ...
Laura DalgleishLong way from
Bayreuth ...
Scott Joplin’s
TreemonishaWoke joke
... Simon
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