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Miss Fortune
Unsolved problems: (l-r) Kathryn Harries, Alan Ewing and Emma Bell struggle to make an impression at Covent Garden. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Unsolved problems: (l-r) Kathryn Harries, Alan Ewing and Emma Bell struggle to make an impression at Covent Garden. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Miss Fortune – review

This article is more than 12 years old
Royal Opera House, London

Was it a plane, a boat or a train? Did the huge generic trapezium in the middle of the stage represent the dizzying moral precipice over which we mortals all too often hurl ourselves, especially in the name of making opera? When the curtain rose on the UK premiere of Judith Weir's Miss Fortune at the Royal Opera House, one thing at least was clear: this bright, coarse staging by Shi-Zheng Chen would flog the living daylights out of the opera's frail, pale construct, inflate it grotesquely beyond its natural size and, by this eye-catching but totally irrelevant visual aeration, render it all but nonsensical. Full marks on all fronts.

It has been a hyperactive week for hubris, schadenfreude and any other not quite correctly used foreign words you care to scatter. Weir is a warmly admired composer, modest in manner but gritty in ambition, as anyone in her field has to be – first to achieve, second to survive. She has a large catalogue of performed works to her name, which will silence any who doubt her considerable gifts, especially vocal. Now in her 50s, she is too experienced, too knowledgable about the bloodied history of most operatic endeavour to have expected to get off lightly. Nonetheless, having written her own libretto as well as the music, she was easy prey. Despite the more than merely polite cheers which greeted the final curtain, and which might have persuaded her that, just possibly, she had a success on her hands, within hours Weir was beaten black and blue by a scrum of negative opinion.

Did it have to be this way? Not entirely, and not so extravagantly and hopelessly. I cannot find much to redeem Miss Fortune in its current form. The work should not have been put on the Royal Opera House stage without rigorous overhaul, especially in a staging so crassly bare and wide open that the voices were left stranded, good singers reduced to reedy insubstantiality, the slim drama robbed of focus. Yes, Tom Pye's design was beautiful, but – stylised beyond the world of the circumstantial – it could have accommodated any opera from Parsifal to Madama Butterfly. Its two central edifices – the shape described above, as well as a big red louvred piece – posed unsolved lighting problems, splitting instead of uniting the space.

We must question the ROH artistic management, perhaps caught in a transitional zone between the departure of Elaine Padmore and the arrival of Kasper Holten as director of opera. Last year's Bregenz staging, the work's world premiere, was an opportunity to take strong action. A first performance of a new opera is the start of a precipitous journey. Most hurtle down the chute at once, all limbs flailing, and plunge straight into the wheelie bin of oblivion. If any does survive, before its next airing it is certain to have been cut, tweaked, titivated or subjected to bold surgery – preferably by the composer, for whom performance is the only great lesson in revealing a work's weaknesses.

The absence of an intermediary sparring partner in the shape of a librettist may have made it difficult for the right person to say to Weir "more here, less there".

Having now heard the piece, and looked through the score, I would have asked: "Did you intend so many of the vocal lines to have a predominantly descending pattern, giving an impression of aural droop? Is there another way?" Never should the final authority be taken away from the composer, but a question might stimulate a rethink. The gap between failure and success in the theatre can be as narrow as a hair's breadth.

Based on a Sicilian folk tale, Miss Fortune has some of the elliptical angularity of Weir's successful A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987). The once-rich little heroine, dogged by cruel Fate, becomes a low-wage earner – cue sweatshops, ironing boards, an imploding fast-food van. She struggles, wins the lottery, casts aside money and goes off with the handsome prince, in his mercifully clean shirt.

And yet the characters are archetypes who grovel in the dirt of cliché. The language needs sharpening to show us that this is satire. We remain indifferent to Miss Fortune (however persuasively sung by a red-wigged Emma Bell), her vulgar nouveau parents who lose their riches, the sharp-suited romantic interest, Simon (the lovely Jacques Imbrailo). Even Fate (countertenor Andrew Watts), with his "cloud" of street dancers, is no more than a mildly creepy stalker. Only Anne-Marie Owens's Donna, who runs a launderette, and Hassan the kebab-van owner, beautifully sung by Noah Stewart (the closest we get to beefcake), show signs of humanity.

Weir is far from incapable of working on a large canvas, but Miss Fortune is surely a chamber opera. Given the intimacy and physical support of the Linbury Studio (instead of the open wastes of the main auditorium) the work would at least have had a fair hearing, instead of becoming an object of near ridicule. The spare orchestration, full of scurrying chromatics, often glistening string writing and crisply atmospheric percussion, including piano, was potentially attractive and melodic, though its variety was mostly lost in the ROH auditorium. The second act has greater pace and vitality: the wise, witty Weir of old is back on form, but too briefly. As far as one could tell, Paul Daniel conducted a good performance.

Two days after this premiere, the Royal Opera House announced the 2012/2013 new season and defended contemporary work as adventure, not measured by normal standards of success. Applying that usage, it has had many "adventures" over the years and the discard pile is high. Next year, George Benjamin's commission Written on Skin will enter the fray and Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur – a tale of loneliness with a furious but poetic score which was unquestionably a success – is revived. A strong ROH2 schedule includes premieres by Scott Walker, Huw Watkins and Stuart MacRae in a season that will offer "fresh and interesting angles on the art form". I hope that does not mean more trapeziums, please.

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