Some of the new works performed this summer have suggested that British composers are hankering after a return to the 1950s and 60s. Anyone who wants a sample of what the music of that era was really like should catch British Youth Opera’s production of Malcolm Williamson’s English Eccentrics, which was first performed at the Aldeburgh festival in 1964, but like so much of Williamson’s considerable output has rarely been seen or heard since.
English Eccentrics was Williamson’s second opera, following smartly on the heels of his version of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, which had been successfully staged at Sadler’s Wells in London the previous year. Like that piece, it’s a comedy, based on Edith Sitwell’s 1933 assemblage of stories and anecdotes about the oddballs of British history. The opera has no narrative thread; its two acts consist of seven more or less independent scenes, each based on one or more of the vignettes from Sitwell’s book.
It’s a strange mixture of the farcical and the vaguely pathetic. A self-obsessed fop attempts to play Romeo; a group of quacks have a meeting with Beau Brummel and his retinue; a rancorous military man attempts to write his memoirs. But there’s nothing eccentric or comic, for instance, about the woman whose brother squanders her fortune and is later hanged for forgery, and there’s something rather awkward and discomfiting now about the tale of the mysterious exotic stranger, Princess Caraboo, who appears on the doorstep of a couple in the West Country to general consternation, but is later outed as a housemaid from Devon.
It all makes an inconsequential basis for an opera, and there’s not much to take away. But the frieze-like construction is well suited to Williamson’s incredibly fluent, quick-witted music, which can turn from the serious and Brittenesque to the style of the fluffiest musical revue at the drop of a crotchet, and which ends the whole opera with a feelgood chorus for the entire cast that would not be out of place in Les Misérables. All of it is executed with great economy – there are only six solo singers and a chorus of four, accompanied by an ensemble of seven players.
Though it would have been interesting to see a production of one of Williamson’s later, more serious stage works – two of his nine operas are based on Strindberg plays – it’s easy to understand why BYO settled on English Eccentrics. The forces required are modest, and each member of the cast gets to play multiple roles, which they carry off with great energy and enthusiasm. If the acting is generally better than the singing in Stuart Barker’s equally economical and fluent staging, the overall performance under Peter Robinson’s sure control is first rate. A couple of voices stand out, especially the soprano Iúnó Connolly as Princess Caraboo and Sarah Whitehead, the woman ruined by her brother, and Matthew Buswell, who turns the military man’s memoir writing into a raging tour de force.
At Peacock theatre, London, until 10 September. Box office: 020-7863 8222.
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