Review

My toes were curled in a rictus of embarrassment at this new opera - review

A wee problem: Lesley Garrett sings well (but playing a long-serving and -suffering lavatory attendant...)
A wee problem: Lesley Garrett sings well (but playing a long-serving and -suffering lavatory attendant...) Credit: Robert Workman

The new opera set in a gay club completely fails to convince Rupert Christiansen of either its ambience, situation or characters - and it stars Lesley Garrett as a lavatory attendant

It’s so long since I’ve been out on the razzle after midnight that I can’t vouch for the literal veracity or otherwise of Pleasure, a new one-act chamber opera set in a buzzing gay club. But do such places really contain elderly lady lavatory attendants who pass the time in knitting? Or drag queens who proclaim themselves “heretic(s) of the capitalist soul”? Or cruising young guys who complain that their life is “nothing but an unlit, lifeless garden” and indulge in la-de-da confessional monologues? 

Yes, this is opera, I know, and a certain degree of licence and poetic stylisation is not against the rules. But at no point did the librettist Melanie Challenger even begin to make me believe in the ambience, situation and characters she presents: instead, Val, the long-serving and -suffering lavatory attendant who is confronted in the club’s ante-room by something from her dark past, seems to inhabit a plot that belongs in darkest Victorian melodrama.

Opera North's 'Pleasure': not the sort of production to answer opera's woes
Opera North's 'Pleasure': not the sort of production to answer opera's woes Credit: Robert Workman

 

The composer Mark Simpson is complicit in this inflation, offering a score that froths itself into a fearful late-Romantic lather, leaving the more interesting option of exploring the cool sonic worlds of techno, trance or even disco unaddressed. Sounds from the dance floor emerge only in two very brief recorded choral interjections; otherwise what one hears seems closer to Janáček or Puccini in sensibility than Freddie Mercury or Sigur Rós, and it doesn’t fit. Simpson clearly has a technique and ideas – there is no want of orchestral colour, and the vocal lines are shapely – but here they are misdirected. 

Tim Albery has devised a straightforward production, imaginatively designed by Leslie Travers, and the four soloists are all very good. Steady of voice and plucky of demeanour, Lesley Garrett sings Val with impeccable diction, ably flanked by Steven Page as a screaming drag queen and Timothy Nelson and Nick Pritchard as the two muddled young men in the case. The chamber orchestra Psappha plays with panache under Nicholas Kok. 

A largely grey-haired and balding audience sat through its 70-minute duration respectfully bemused and applauded politely at the end. The target public – that youthful constituency so reluctant to sample opera – was nowhere in evidence. My toes were curled tightly in a rictus of embarrassment: this sort of thing is just not the answer to any of opera’s woes. 

In Leeds until April 30, then touring. Tickets: operanorth.co.uk //

 

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