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Migrations
Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay
WELSH National Opera is to be congratulated on commissioning a new opera, Migrations, and also using such a contentious subject.
The audience was markedly more diverse than usual opera-goers, and it was refreshing to see so many black performers on stage.
Composer Will Todd has created a wonderful body of music to cover the different tales told within the opera and working with different librettists.
Todd also created the music for the company’s successful return to live theatre last summer with his opera Alice In Wonderland.
Migrations is five separate but overlapping parts telling the story of different types of migrations.
The running theme that runs throughout the opera is a flock of migrant birds and the voyage of the Mayflower and its cargo of Christian zealots seeking pastures new in the US.
Most movingly is the English lesson where refugees and asylum speakers learn phrases as they begin the process of learning to speak English.
The banality and monotony of the phrases they learn by rote enables librettist Sarah Woods to draw out the harrowing individual stories.
What does not work so well in the second half of the performance is the story of the Indian doctors enticed to Britain to work in the NHS set against the backdrop of Enoch Powell’s infamous Rivers of Blood speech.
What jars in this is not only the stereotypical Bollywood-style dance the doctors perform, but the portrayal of the only British working-class characters in the show as racist buffoons.
The racist othering and blaming of immigrants for the supposed ills of society did encourage racists, but that was not confined to the working class.
Most notably in Lewisham in the 1970s it was working-class support that led to the bloody battle forcing the National Front off the streets. This followed in the tradition set in the East End in the Battle for Cable Street.
The grand finale saw a group of astronauts bounce in slow motion across the stage as a future migration to other planets — unfortunately, the astronauts were all white.
What will be the litmus test for the WNO is whether it continue its efforts to attract a more diverse audience.
More hit than miss, this is a show well worth a visit.
Migrations also tours and can be seen until November 26 2022 — details from www.wno.org.uk
