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In the Locked Room
Mysterious … Ruby Hughes in In the Locked Room. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Mysterious … Ruby Hughes in In the Locked Room. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

In the Locked Room/Ghost Patrol – Edinburgh festival review

This article is more than 11 years old
Traverse

Though packaged in Scottish Opera's mini-season of new work, the double bill of one-act operas by Huw Watkins and Stuart MacRae is actually a Music Theatre Wales show; both works are conducted by one of the company's artistic directors, Michael Rafferty, while the other, Michael McCarthy, directs Watkins's piece. It was MTW that introduced Watkins's first opera, Crime Fiction, three years ago; that had a text by David Harsent, and it is Harsent who has written the textthis time, too, loosely basing In the Locked Room on a short story by Thomas Hardy.

A young couple rent a room in a house on the Sussex coast for a holiday, where the wife, Ella, discovers another room is permanently let to a poet, Ben Pascoe, whose work fascinates her; Pascoe insists his room remain locked when he is not there. Ella becomes more and more obsessed with the poet and his work, and when he makes a brief visit the inevitable happens. She becomes pregnant and Pascoe is reported dead – whether the victim of an accident, murder or suicide is never clear.

The whole mysterious fable is told in less than 45 minutes. There's no spare flesh on Harsent's lapidary text, nor on Watkins's vocal writing; the textures he draws from the 14 instrumentalists in the pit have a Britten-like economy, every one fit for its expressive purpose. It's a beautifully crafted piece of music theatre, unfussily staged by McCarthy, with fine performances from Ruby Hughes as Ella, Håkan Vramsmo as Pascoe, Louise Winter as the randy owner of the house, and Paul Curievici as Ella's money-obsessed husband.

Ghost Patrol, MacRae's opera, is considerably longer than Watkins's and far less cogent; it could easily lose 20 minutes without compromising the slender story of two veterans from an unnamed war meeting again, reliving the trauma of their service together, and finally both being destroyed by it. Louise Welsh's text is over-wordy and ridden with cliches; the instrumental writing and the sonorities in MacRae's score are far more striking than his vocal lines. The performances – James McOran-Campbell and Nicholas Sharratt the ex-soldiers, Jane Harrington as the girl caught between them – are first-rate, though, and Matthew Richardson's production does everything required of it, except disguise the opera's longueurs.

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