OperaUpClose’s new production is not quite the opera as Wagner conceived it. The myth of the seaman condemned for eternity to sail the seas unless redeemed by love has been reconceived as a contemporary piece with political resonance. In a dystopian England hardening its borders, hostile to those seeking refuge, the Dutchman is a traumatised mariner who is a people-smuggler and Senta becomes Starlight, one of the vigilant volunteers out on the white cliffs, who has misgivings about the mission to “shield the island from invasion”.
When director Lucy Bradley originally conceived the idea – pre-pandemic – there was no inkling that, by the time the project came to fruition, the Home Office would have set in train such draconian anti-immigration measures as to make the imagined dystopia all too real. By way of underlining the opera’s coastal and maritime context, the company is touring at venues in historic seaports and, at a time when ships are being fitted out to house asylum seekers, no setting could be more symbolic than Brunel’s SS Great Britain in Bristol, the steamship rescued from the South Atlantic and restored as a monument to past glories.
Yet no matter how evocative the location, how important the subject and how honourable the intention – spelled out clearly enough in the synopsis – the narrative is too often hard to fathom. For all that it carries moments of immediacy, poet Glyn Maxwell’s new libretto with its long spells of emoting and gazing out into a dark horizon doesn’t help the treatment emerge authentically in its own right.
Laura Bowler’s re-instrumentation of Wagner’s big score for an eight-piece ensemble is intriguing enough to make up some of the deficit. Violin, cello, double bass, accordion and percussion are balanced by flute, doubling piccolo, and clarinet doubling bass clarinet – the latter particularly effective – with the horn reassuringly faithful to Wagner’s signature theme for the beleaguered Mariner. Wind and swell of the sea storms were always atmospheric. Most inventively, Bowler also requires her musicians to provide the chorus and no plaudits can be sufficient for the members of Manchester Camerata and conductor Timothy Burke who sang and played, sometimes in quick alternation and variously dressed for the parts – sailors, watch volunteers, smuggled travellers – and themselves acting up a storm.
OperaUpClose’s strong quartet of singers, Pauls Putnins, Philippa Boyle, Carolyn Holt and Timothy Dawkins, were more than adequate to Wagner’s demands even if, up close the full blast of their voices was occasionally too powerful. As the Mariner, the Latvian Putnins stood out, both for the quality of his baritone, his impeccable English diction and for the palpable sincerity of his pain.
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