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Steven Page and Nicholas Sharratt in Scottish Opera’s  The Devil Inside.
Steven Page and Nicholas Sharratt in Scottish Opera’s The Devil Inside. Photograph: Bill Cooper
Steven Page and Nicholas Sharratt in Scottish Opera’s The Devil Inside. Photograph: Bill Cooper

The Devil Inside; Found and Lost review – two new operas, a genie and room service

This article is more than 8 years old

Theatre Royal, Glasgow; Corinthia hotel, London
Stuart MacRae’s devilish new opera is intimate, intense and unsettling. And Emily Hall finds quiet drama in hotel corridors

Magic rings, love potions, gods, dragons, talking birds and singing animals have always been key staples in the store house of opera. Without them Wagner would be sunk. Those of us who resist fantasy in novels or plays happily swallow it in the most heightened art form of all. A woman who is 300 years old (as in Janácek’s The Makropoulos Case) still appears less awkward than someone singing “Where did I put my keys?”. Puccini pioneered masterpieces out of brute social reality, yet still the supernatural keeps its grip. George Benjamin’s Written on Skin features heavenly creatures. Georg Friedrich Haas’s Morgen und Abend takes place mainly in the afterlife. The new opera by Thomas Adès, being premiered at this summer’s Salzburg festival, is based on Luis Buñuel’s absurdist film The Exterminating Angel.

The Scottish partnership of composer Stuart MacRae and novelist Louise Welsh, on their third collaboration, have combined both fantasy and reality with great deftness. Their new opera The Devil Inside, a co-commission between Scottish Opera and Music Theatre Wales, is based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson (The Bottle Imp), a pact-with-the-devil tale. A luminous green genie – in Samal Blak’s clean-lined, minimalist design – wreaks havoc from within its glass bottle. At the same time two backpackers, now in thrall to the genie, discuss property development, high-rises in Dubai and a condominium in California. Whoever owns the magic bottle will gain untold power. If they die with it in their possession, they face damnation. As a final twist, the bottle can only be sold for less than the price it was bought: as the price drops with each transaction, getting rid of it becomes a finite option.

Watch a trailer for The Devil Inside

Welsh’s text is taut and lean. Surtitles are welcome but almost redundant since each of the four singers – Richard Sherratt, Ben McAteer (a Scottish Opera emerging artist), Steven Page and Rachel Kelly – enunciate clearly. They also sing MacRae’s forgiving and conversational vocal style with rigour, and act well under the direction of Matthew Richardson. The excellent 14-strong ensemble of soloists, members of the orchestra of Scottish Opera conducted by Michael Rafferty, easily filled the Theatre Royal’s 1,500-seat auditorium with their beguiling sounds, but the mood of the piece is intimate, intense, disturbing.

Eloquent and beautifully crafted rather than radical, MacRae’s music gleams and shudders, with many low instruments – alto flute, bass clarinet, contrabassoon – making their presence felt, now ominous, now mellow and rich. Scoring is transparent, quixotic, each strand audible and drawn together like a loose-woven mesh to encompass and support the voices. String players double on harmonicas. Occasionally there are sonic drifts into microtonality but mostly for the genie’s strange, unsettling music. The pairing of tenor trombone with trumpet manages to sound like a full brass section instead of merely two skilled players. Harp and percussion are kept busy. When James (McAteer), the more questioning of the two protagonists, watches an old couple cross the road and ponders the end of life, the strings have a burst of sudden lyricism. Tender episodes such as these offset the brittle tale of the magic bottle and give the piece rewarding depth.

Found and Lost at the Corinthia hotel. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Ingenious thought it is, no genies appear in Emily Hall’s tiny and effective Found and Lost, subtitled “an opera installation”, conceived with David Sheppard and based on poems by Matthew Welton written using texts found within Corinthia hotel, London. Hall has been artist-in-residence there for a month, the first composer in a scheme now in its fourth year. The drawback is that only a dozen people at a time can watch the hour-long event, since it takes place in lobbies, conference room, boiler room and a guest suite in the luxury hotel, just off Whitehall and once part of the Ministry of Defence. At times it wasn’t clear whether the empty cups on a tray outside a room, or the people dining, were part of the performance, but that was all part of the quiet drama.

There is a loose, implied murder-mystery story, with clues such as a bouquet of flowers, a wrench and a pillow. Some of the music is relayed through portable speakers or (involving soprano Mara Carlyle and tenor Allan Clayton) on video. The real pleasure comes in stepping out of a lift and finding cellist Oliver Coates playing in a corner, or in being led down a thickly carpeted corridor by the superb a cappella chorus (members of Siglo de Oro) who sing Hall’s close harmonies and melodies: she is a composer steeped in song, her music immediately appealing. If anyone can make an exquisite lullaby out of a hotel’s “turndown checklist” (one chocolate box on either side, eight cotton balls in the jar, slippers in pairs), Hall is the one and I’ll happily stay in her hotel.

Star ratings (out of 5)
The Devil Inside ****
Found and Lost ***

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