Review

Powder her Face, Belfast - finally, great acting makes emotional sense of this opera

Powder Her Face
Powder Her Face Credit:  Patrick Redmond

Oliver Mears, the unexpected successor to Kasper Holten as Director of Opera at Covent Garden next month, has to date attracted most attention through his leadership of Northern Ireland Opera – a part-time organisation for which he has been very ambitious, both in terms of community participation and of repertory. 

The results have earned a mixed reception, but he is quitting Belfast with a stylish flourish. Whether programming Thomas Adès’ and Philip Hensher’s camp and risqué treatment of the scandal surrounding Margaret Duchess of Argyll is quite what the broader Ulster public wants or needs is a moot point, but one has to salute Mears’ determination not to dumb down or play safe.

I first heard Powder her Face over 20 years ago, and until now have felt uncomfortably ambivalent towards it. The sheer ingenuity of Adès’ music – with its super-sophisticated allusions to Der Rosenkavalier, The Rake’s Progress and Lulu, as well as its facile pastiche of inter-war popular music – can seem too artful, too smug, too clever by half. 

And for all its comparable wit and edge, Hensher’s libretto never explains why on earth one should feel interest in - or sympathy for – such a self-centred and self-destructive, pampered and privileged creature as the Duchess. (Or is that just the point?)

Powder Her Face
Powder Her Face Credit:  Patrick Redmond

In any case, my anxieties have been eradicated, at least temporarily, by Northern Ireland Opera’s production, which is quite breathtakingly good in every respect.

Nicholas Chalmers conducts a first-rate band drawn from the Ulster Orchestra with exemplary panache and gusto, relishing all the music’s ostentatious intricacies and dazzling special effects. Antony McDonald directs and designs a handsome staging that is equally assured, handling the notoriously graphic sex scene with bravado and striking just the right balance between dirty farce, cool artifice and human tragedy throughout.

So does the cast of four. Three of them skilfully play multiple roles – Daire Halpin and Adrian Dwyer are both pitch-perfect in their incarnations of representatives of the lower orders, while Stephen Richardson delivers a tour de force as the hysterical divorce court judge. At the epicentre, however, is Mary Plazas as the Duchess. In a truly great piece of operatic acting, she makes this paper monster of egocentricity absurd yet pitiable in her delusions and humiliation, thus making moral and emotional sense of the entire opera. 

Until tonight  Box office 028 9038 1081

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