★★☆☆☆
Over the years Graham Vick’s community-rooted Birmingham Opera Company has made an awesome art form out of mounting epic, promenade-style music-theatre in grim warehouses. It’s easy to be dazzled by the rough-hewn spectacle — theatre of poverty done on a Cecil B DeMille scale — and by the military precision with which Vick shunts around his cast of hundreds as well as the audience. I fear, however, that with the world premiere of Wake, by the veteran composer Giorgio Battistelli and the playwright Sarah Woods, BOC has poured energy and resourcefulness into a pretentious dud.
The title is a pun: wake in the sense of what follows a funeral (we are all invited to wrap our heads in black veils as the show