The Lighthouse – review

Peter Maxwell Davies's 1980 chamber opera is based on a real-life mystery. In 1900, a routine visit by a supply ship to the lighthouse on the Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides found the three keepers missing, with no evidence as to what had happened to them. Many theories have been advanced to explain this Marie Celeste-like discovery, and Davies' fictional take, if less plausible than some, nevertheless provides a solid dramatic foundation for his work.

In his version, the three lighthouse keepers are sick of themselves and of each other, the abysses within and between them cracking open during the second act. In an attempt to defuse the tension, each sings a song – giving the composer the opportunity to draw on his long-favourite device of parody. One of the keepers, Blazes, launches into a rough-hewn ballad that reveals his violent family history and murderous past. Sandy waxes lyrical in parlour-song idiom about a romantic love idyll that also turns out to enclose a dark secret he would prefer to forget. Religious obsessive Arthur (pictured left) intones a tub-thumping hymn. His vision of a threatening apocalyptic beast leads the three increasingly deranged individuals outside the lighthouse, where their fate awaits. Davies frames the action with scenes of the naval officers at the subsequent inquiry and just after their arrival at the lighthouse.

Neil Irish's set doubles cleverly as the courtroom and the lighthouse interior, just as the three remarkable performers – tenor Adam Tunnicliffe's flakey Sandy, baritone Nicholas Merryweather's lairy Blazes and bass Richard Mosley-Evans's forbidding Arthur – switch fluently between the two sets of characters. Ted Huffman's English Touring Opera staging is taut and direct. Richard Baker conducts the Aurora Orchestra in a focused account of the worthwhile score, which supplies abundant atmosphere and menacing momentum.

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