Heady sets and costumes in Jim Sharman's Cosi
Okay it’s time for some catching up – about ten shows of interest I have seen of late so I hope this doesn’t not descend into cultural sausage making. On the other hand with so much ‘amnesia’ going around I also have to work fast.
Won’t be easy to forget last night: Neil Armfield’s Australian Opera production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. If you have ever wondered what it is like to experience a theatrical event that is, within human bounds, ideally realised at all levels – then this is one of them. Opera draws on ALL the resources available to the performing arts. It is nearly impossible to get so many elements, some often highly complex, to come together in true union. Much much work goes into such an achievement – and then, if luck would have it, that mysterious magical sprinkling of faerie dust.
That said the unified design field which held this production together (set by Ralph Myers, costumes by Tess Schofield, lights by Damien Cooper) did not work for everyone in the audience. I have had an extensive conversation with a friend who was there last night who grew up in the region the story is set – a provincial English coastal fishing village - and he was with a visiting European opera director of some renown. The staging of this production did not speak to them at all. So we must remember even at what some of us might regard as the highest levels of achievement, one person’s goose is another’s gander.
Nichola Bakopoulos-Cooke (John) and Stuart Skelton (Grimes): Photo by Branca Gaica
If reaction at the fall of the final curtain is anything to go on, there is no doubt this production certainly made a big impact on large swathes of the largely home-town audience. There is no question about the music and singing. The score of Peter Grimes is a stunning achievement from Britten and it is ravishingly realized here by the orchestra, chorus and leads under the baton of Mark Wigglesworth. Nor did it appear that the largely Sydneysider audience had any problems with the setting. Instead of the dank and brooding atmosphere of most stagings, this production is set in the kind of community hall that might be found in one of our own seaside towns. I think the idea was to give us both a visual connection to the story but also a mostly empty space into which we would paint our own version of the Britten’s ‘original’ world in response to the words and music. How else do we explain the huge impact the production had on me, my guest, and pretty much everyone around us who rose very quickly to their feet at closure. This was not one of those nights when an opera audience was applauding the luxurious and the lavish – the experience, as a musical and dramatic event, had clearly made it mark. We were moved by the encounter with the work at a deep emotional level
Why works for the stage each of us find ‘great’ stay with us forever is a mystery imbedded in the synapses. I have sometimes taken up the analogy of photography: that highly evolved works of art, due to their ‘focus’ (emotional, intellectual, formal), are in effect imprinted onto our bodies permanently like tattoos – perhaps x-ray like in the way they are surely ‘real’ but we can apparently also see through them. Layer upon layer. Like ceremonial markings handed down by the elders of our tribe, we carry these ‘designs for living’ through to our dying days.
Tiffany Speight (Despina) in Cosi
I have made some ungenerous remarks through this Sydney winter season for the AO, about how the company appears to be artistically rudderless, and the good the bad and the ugly are all thrown in together. Perhaps, by way of explanation, that is in an attempt to satisfy competing aesthetics and yearnings among various sectors of the subscriber base. The most honorable spin I can put on it; though it doesn’t explain why, even within a given aesthetic – say the Gilbert & Sullivan tradition – some productions are just plain bad. In any case, such a curatorially ‘loose’ approach to reviving previous productions and commissioning new work does include the chance for good works to rise to the top. A couple of weeks ago director Jim Sharman returned to the company after a long break with an ambitious and highly intellectualized production of Mozart’s cosi fan tutte (1790). Was it perfect, perhaps not to some. But, like Armfield’s Grimes, it is a work now sitting at the top end of the AO repertoire and deserves to be seen my anybody who can get to it.
Both works (Cosi and Grimes) pose enormous challenges to stage directors in that each demands a most succinct interpretation. Other operas have great arias strung together by such silly story lines ‘interpretation’ as such is hardly worth the effort. But, like Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the sexual (or racial) politics are out of date in Cosi; and something has to be done with the closing sentiments of the piece which, in its bare form, suggests ‘women are basically fickle and that is something men just have to put up with’. I don’t want to open a huge can of worms here, but some who listen to the music closely are inclined to suggest that the guys as well as the girls are confronted with the moral challenge of ‘constancy’, that the opera is really about forgiveness anyway; that all of us let down our loved ones at some point in our relationships and it is how we deal with that ‘fact’ that the opera ultimately chooses to explore. I leave that debate to others better informed. There was, nonetheless, a great deal admire in Sharman’s interpretation: not just some gorgeous singing and acting, and very edgy costumes and sets, but also the ambitiousness of the ‘reading’ which invited us to look at Mozart and da Ponte’s witty meditation on love and fidelity through the eyes of a newly-married Japanese couple. The setting is a contemporary wedding feast with the bride and groom seated on chairs right on the edge of the lip of the stage – as if the opera is being presented, in essence for their ‘degustation’ and entertainment. And from which, ideally, some insights may be drawn and carried into their shared lives.
In terms of careers and the sweep of history it was great to see a new large-scale Sharman production and even if at times the concept felt a little forced (to me), there was no doubting we were in the presence of a creation by a consummately gifted stage director. It’s odd isn’t it, where I thought Armfield’s s sat almost ‘naturally’ on the stage, my friends were squirming somewhere in the rows behind me. It is interesting to note that both Sharman and Armfield employed the same stage (Myers) and lighting (Cooper) designers. They, with costumiers (Schofield for Armfield and Gabriela Tylasova for Sharman) belong to the extraordinary generation who are currently hitting their stride. I can barely wait to see what ensues over the next twenty years – and I intend to stay alive what they do (certainly for this reason among others). They are an incredibly gifted and confident bunch.
I am not an opera reviewer and I am mainly writing about these productions because they come from two of our most important and now (both) senior stage directors. Putting my theatre interests to one said for a moment, I have to admit that last night’s Peter Grimes also drew me into a world of music that is a very rare experience for me. I am trained like a good show dog to look and think and digest the text and the action. Last night the noises from the orchestra pit, the choir and the lead voices took me to a place I very rarely get (or allow myself) to go. What is it about Britten’s work? It speaks to us in this country in our time so vividly. In my years of attending opera, not coincidentally, Jim’s Sharman’s 1980 version of Britten’s Death in Venice (sets by Brian Thomson, costumes by Luciana Arrighi) is also one of the productions I know will stay with me forever. Burnt on my soul.
Yes, Mozart is the genius and his operas are amazing; and his Magic Flute is probably my favourite of all operas. But his world is courtly and hierarchical that is ultimately quite foreign to us. And so for the singers as well as audiences are required to bridge a huge gap. Britten’s milieu is something closer to us – and it seems out artists (and then our audiences) find it easier to get to the heart of these sobering and highly emotive works. This was certainly true of Stuart Skelton last night as the loner fisherman of the title who must confront the ferocity of his village after losing not one but two of his boy ‘prentices at sea. Whatever one’s interest in opera as theatre, in this production of Peter Grimes, all said and done and in incredible company, it is Skelton’s seething musical inhabitation of the role that we will never forget. I will be taking the markings with me, I have no doubt, as I am pushed out to sea in my little canoe at the end of my life like Johnny Depp in Dead Man. Which is kinda what happens at the end of this opera, rather than confront the horror of the impending village mob he takes the advice of those who love him and gets in his boat and pushes himself – alone against the judging forces of nature – back out to sea. One way, he is heading out to join his lost boys at the bottom of the sea.
