Ask a Chinese person, or one trusted to speak to tourists, about the current status of Mao Zedong – founder of the People’s Republic of China, proponent of the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution – and you get a dusty answer. Dead more than 40 years, his popularity waxing in some quarters, Chairman Mao still dominates Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. His mausoleum has queues. His face gazes down, godlike, at the entrance to the Forbidden City.
Most of China was forbidden when the US president, Richard Nixon, and his foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, travelled there in 1972. They met Mao, elderly and ill, and his premier, Chou En-lai, only slightly younger and fitter. By any standards, this meeting of east and west fascinates. To make an opera out of it, as John Adams and the poet Alice Goodman did in 1987, with the director Peter Sellars, was inspired: an explosive moment in global history compressed into three hours of lyrical drama. Nixon in China was first seen at Houston Grand Opera. Its UK premiere took place at the Edinburgh international festival a year later. Sellars’s Houston production morphed into stagings at English National Opera in 2000 and the New York Met in 2011.
No wonder such anticipation greeted Scottish Opera’s new staging, a co-production with the Royal Danish Theatre and Teatro Real Madrid, directed by John Fulljames, conducted by Joana Carneiro, with the American baritone Eric Greene in the title role. For her richly poetic libretto, Goodman did her research exhaustively, but geopolitics only provides a framework. The drama is about humans, about hopes and dreams and mortality. Each of the chief characters, including the president’s thoughtful wife, Pat Nixon (Julia Sporsén, compelling and convincing), is presented sympathetically, with the exception of prickly Madame Mao (Hye-Youn Lee, properly scary in her screeching, showpiece coloratura aria).
Fulljames and designer Dick Bird and their team have updated the action to a nonspecific present. We are witnesses to an archive, piled floor to ceiling with brown boxes, the mythologising of Mao laid out before us, image by image, by white-gloved curators and administrators. The embalmed Mao is wheeled past in his glass cooler, to emphasise the vantage point: we’re sifting through history. Storage screens slide back and forth as required, creating a fluid space for the action. A projected backdrop shows documentary imagery, including some later unlikely pairings: Reagan and Gorbachev, Trump and Kim Jong-un and, raising a noisy laugh, Johnson and Sturgeon. Fulljames still manages a modest coup at the arrival of Air Force One, even if not quite achieving the lofty spectacle of Sellars’s original.
Initially, Carneiro took a ponderous tempo, orchestra and chorus slow to warm up to the punchy energies of Adams in minimalist mode – and, whatever its reputation, Nixon in China has a far more diverse and subtle palette, embracing saxophone-heavy big band, moody dance music and prolonged, Wagnerian resolution. Adams’s rhythmic ingenuity in setting Goodman’s text, in all its variety, is a topic in itself. As the performers’ confidence grew, so that first uncertainty vanished. The sound was enhanced by a subtle amplification system (by German specialists d&b audiotechnik), its first use in a UK opera. By the time Greene, in his Scottish Opera debut and brilliantly cast as Nixon, launched into his propulsive, media-addicted “News” aria (“it’s prime time in the USA”), all was well.
As Mao, in his few appearances, Mark Le Brocq masterfully conveyed a sense both of charisma and folly. David Stout’s Kissinger, awkward boffin, has little opportunity to show his inquisitive powers: “Please, where’s the toilet?” is one of his more memorable lines. The dancers in the violent, revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women, the three secretaries to Mao (Louise Callinan, Sioned Gwen Davies, Emma Carrington), the “chorus of Nixon in China” and the orchestra of Scottish Opera all combined to make this a gripping and absorbing show.
Yet the lyrical moments, the private reflections especially of Pat Nixon and of the philosophically inclined Chou En-lai – elegantly sung by Nicholas Lester – stood out. “How much of what we did was good?” Chou asks at the end, contemplating lonely old age. And Richard Nixon, complex, ambiguous, so soon to be brought down by Watergate, has his own, all-American memories: “I found the smell of burgers on the grill made grown men cry.” Never the twain shall meet.
Nixon in China is at the Festival theatre, Edinburgh, 27-29 February
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