Review

The Skating Rink review, Garsington Opera at Wormsley: an intriguing experiment in neo-noir that pays off handsomely 

The Skating Ring Opera by David Sawyer
The Skating Ring Opera by David Sawyer Credit: Alastair Muir/AMX

I haven’t read The Skating Rink, a thriller by the fashionable Latin American novelist Roberto Bolano, and staring at the synopsis for this operatic adaptation induced feelings of mild panic – all I could sense was a confusing, multi-layered narrative and characters on whose comings and goings it was impossible to get a grip. It’s not an uncommon problem in this line of business.

Thankfully, what emerges on stage is actually quite lucid – this is an elliptical noir yarn of elusive significance, set in a town on the Costa Brava, where a local government official Enric is so infatuated with a beautiful figure-skater Nuria that he secretly builds her a rink with public funds.

Nuria is having an affair with a smoothie entrepreneur Remo; a feckless poet and the murder of a down-and-out opera singer also enter the mix.

The librettist Rory Mullarkey has done a smart job of shaping the material and its complex time-frame, not least in inspiring the composer David Sawer to the creation of a fascinating and lively score.

Sawer’s two previous large-scale operas (From Morning to Midnight for ENO, and Skin Deep for Opera North) have been flawed but ambitious and interesting misfires: this one seems nearer the mark, possessed of an inventive energy that lapses only in a protracted third act during which the unsympathetic Enric (solidly played by Grant Doyle, a late substitute for Neal Davies) spends too much time directly addressing the audience with his side of the story.

The Skating Ring Opera by David Sawer
The Skating Ring Opera by David Sawer Credit: Alastair Muir/AMX

But there is much good music throughout – some of it with a Stravinskian acerbic edge, some of it lushly sentimental and some of it animated by Hispanic rhythms that wouldn’t be out of place in West Side Story.

Sawer is an imaginative orchestrator and an accomplished contrapuntalist, and even if the end result doesn’t have the crystalline clarity and masterly pacing that George Benjamin displayed in Written on Skin, it does have something of the latter’s innate theatricality.

Garry Walker conducts the orchestra with panache, and Stewart Laing provides a cool, stylish staging in day-glo colours that cleverly incorporates a non-iced skating floor on which the inept tumble and the skilled float.

Ben Edquist as Remo and Lauren Zolezzi as Nuria
Ben Edquist as Remo and Lauren Zolezzi as Nuria  Credit: Alastair Muir/AMX

Among a clutch of assured performances, Sam Furness as the poet and Susan Bickley as the opera singer stand out vocally. A new opera at a country-house festival will never draw the crowds, but the first night-audience seemed attentive and enthusiastic, and I think Garsington’s management can count this experiment a success.

Until July 16, in rep with Falstaff. Tickets: 01865 361636; garsingtonopera.org. The opera will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in the autumn.   

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