Review

The Golden Dragon is a witty Brechtian fable with a brilliant score

Music Theatre Wales's The Golden Dragon at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff
Music Theatre Wales's The Golden Dragon at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff Credit: Clive Barda/Arena PAL

I’ve vacillated wildly in my response to the operas of Peter Eötvös: his adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters struck me as strangely powerful, but Le Balcon and Love and other Demons at Glyndebourne were flat-footed flops; Angels in America I liked much more the second time I heard it than I did the first. 

First performed in Frankfurt in 2014, his most recent creation has now been given its British première by Music Theatre Wales. Based on a play by the German writer Roland Schimmelpfennig, The Golden Dragon is both a surprise and a success – a one-act chamber opera in 21 short scenes lasting barely 90 minutes.

'Richly comic and unnervingly opaque': The Golden Dragon
'Richly comic and unnervingly opaque': The Golden Dragon Credit: Clive Barda/Arena PAL

It’s a Brechtian fable, clearly didactic and leftist in style, but richly comic and unnervingly opaque as well. Five singers embody multiple characters, often standing back to comment or moralise on the situation. The setting in some sort of low-rent Asian restaurant in an unnamed western city, where an illegally immigrant kitchen hand is suffering from terrible toothache. Because he has no papers, he cannot visit a dentist, so other members of staff take his problem into their own hands, with disastrous results.

Alongside other subsidiary narrative strands, this is interlaced with a version of the Aesopian fable of the industrious Ant and the indolent Cricket, who ends up here being sexually exploited.

Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts, Lilo Evans and Johnny Herford in The Golden Dragon
A seamless ensemble: Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts, Lilo Evans and Johnny Herford in The Golden Dragon Credit: Clive Barda/Arena PAL

Eötvös’s score is spare but brilliant, and flecked with moments of rare beauty. Until two luminously lyrical monologues at the climax, the vocal lines are fragmentary and often couched in a sing-song speech; underneath them, the orchestration playfully alludes to oriental modes and sonorities, contrasting bursts of glittering percussive with the ominous timbres of contra-bassoon and contrabass-clarinet. The pacing is masterly, as is the passage from two-dimensional cartoon-like farce to resonant human tragedy: I began being baffled and amused, but I ended up haunted and moved.

Immaculately rehearsed, Music Theatre Wales’s performance is exemplary in its clarity and simplicity. Michael McCarthy’s staging calls on the audience’s imagination and Simon Banham’s witty design wastes nothing on fancy detail: Geoffrey Paterson’s conducting of a superb band is flawless. Llio Evans, Lucy Schaufer, Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts and Johnny Herford make a seamless ensemble, notable both for its spirited acting and its excellent diction.

In a year unusually full of operatic novelty, The Golden Dragon stands out as a subtly piquant delight.

The Golden Dragon will tour the UK in 2017

 

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