9: Triple bill! La Bohème, Les Mis and The Minotaur

La Bohème at Hackney Picture House

www.picturehouses.co.uk

Visited on Tuesday 15 January 2013

Les Misérables at Hackney Picture House

www.picturehouses.co.uk

Visited on Wednesday 16 January 2013

The Minotaur at Royal Opera House

www.roh.org.uk

Visited on Thursday 17 January 2013

Since I haven’t written for a while, and as this is to be the penultimate contribution to the culturecake project, I thought I’d go for an unprecendented ‘three in one’. It has been a week of culture consumption bordering on the extreme as I’ve been spending the daytimes doing my revision on opera and ballet in preparation for my new job that starts on Monday, while three consecutive evenings have seen me heading out for some kind of musical / theatrical piece of entertainment.

The first was Puccini’s La Bohème, on Tuesday night. I’ve seen the opera only once before – almost 20 years ago at the Oxford Apollo, when Welsh National Opera visited. I don’t remember too much about it, except for thinking that the final scene where Mimi succumbs to her illness and dies her frail, tiny, cold little death was a bit difficult to believe given the robust corpulence of the soprano playing the role…

Tonight’s performance was a ‘delayed live’ relay from the Royal Opera House, ie it was recorded live last week and we were watching the unedited footage from that. There are some significant advantages to watching a performance like this in the cinema: for a start the cost of a very comfortable, modern seat is £20 and you can take your wine in with you; at the Opera House proper, the same view would cost you about £165, the seat would be narrow and apparently designed for the sole purpose of giving you backache, and there’s no way the apparently deferential but actually Nazi stewards would let you into that auditorium with a glass of anything. Additionally, at the cinema you get the ROH’s Music Director Antonio Pappano on the screen before it starts to give you a plot summary and to tell you all sorts of interesting things about the music and staging and so on. The disadvantage is that you don’t get the magical atmosphere of being in such a grand place as the Royal Opera House, with its poncey staircases and people dressed up to the nines and interval drinks that cost the same as food to feed a family of four for a week. The nice thing about the ROH’s ‘wear what you like’ policy is that you can go along in jeans and still get to hang out with people in fancy outfits who make you feel like you’re part of a posh and special experience.

Anyway, there was none of that at Hackney Picturehouse, although thankfully there was a gentleman in the audience who was of that sort, if you know what I mean. When the opera started there were no subtitles on the screen, Sir Ponce took it upon himself to stand up and boom ‘SHALL I COMPLAIN?’ – to which general assent was murmured and lo, within minutes the subtitles had appeared and we were spared having to watch 2.75 hours of Italian opera with no translation.

To be honest, I do wonder whether it would have mattered. Puccini’s music is, as well as being generally lush and gorgeous, quite consciously descriptive of the words it sets. Combined with some properly excellent acting from every member of the cast, we probably would have been fairly clear about what was going on even without subtitles. This production, directed by John Copley, has been around even longer than I have – it was first staged in 1974. It’s easy to see why the Opera House hasn’t changed it in those 38 years. 1830s Paris is wonderfully evoked by the detailed sets and costumes. The staging (which mainly involves the draughty apartment shared by the four student artists Rodolfo, Marcello, Schaunard and Colline) is presented on multiple levels, and there’s always something to look at and lots of opportunity for interesting movement by the singers.

I have always thought opera plots were a bit far-fetched – I mean, really? You really fell in love after gazing at each other for about 30 seconds and exchanging a couple of well-executed high notes? Obviously though, you have to suspend quite a bit of disbelief for this artform and rely on the talents of the director and musicians in the pit and on the stage to make that easy for you.

As an example, La Bohème (The Bohemians) starts with the four chaps bantering and generally horsing around at their apartment, bemoaning their poverty with mock-drama and silly antics. When his chums head off to the pub, Rodolfo is the only one in to answer the door to poor Mimi, whose candle has gone out so she can’t see her way up the stairs. Rodolfo swoons over how lovely she is, there is a bit of flirting, then she drops her key on the floor by mistake and they both fumble around in the dark for it, which results in the fizzing contact of Rodolfo’s manly mano and Mimi’s tiny frozen one, leading to the first famous aria ‘Chè gelida manina’. Over the course of the next 5 minutes, Rodolfo basically sings her his CV, she tells him about how she adores flowers and the smell of spring and then, boom, they are fully in love and pledging never to leave each other. Riiiight.

Yet, from the beginning the absolutely superb quality of the singing and acting draws you right in to the world where such happenings are completely normal. The banter between the four students was heart-warmingly believable, and though it’s set at a time and in a world so different from today, I think most people can identify with that kind of housemate vibe. Dmytro Popov’s portrayal of Rodolfo was such a great combination of honest and subtle that I found myself quietly cheering him on as he poured out his heart to Mimi, even though if a man did this to me only two minutes after us meeting, I’d be quite freaked out by it.

The good thing about this opera is that the story rattles along without any wastage – the economic informational conversations lead to one beautiful aria after another, none of which are overblown. There are glory moments for all the principal singers to show what they can do. Stefania Dovhan, playing Musetta, was brilliant (and slutty) as she sang her famous Waltz aria in Act 2, while provocatively running her hand up and down a pool cue, in her attempt to seduce former lover Marcello (played by Audun Iversen, with a goatee that made him look a bit like Ben Affleck). After various machinations involving either provoked or unprovoked jealousy on the part of both couples, and some jolly slapstick with a real live dog, we get to the closing scenes where poor Mimi’s frailty is now a serious concern. Essentially she has TB, and that, combined with a separation from Rodolfo in Act 3, has precipitated The End. She ends up dying round at the four students’ flat, after they’ve made really touching gestures to sell their own personal items to pay for a doctor and some medicine. Both I and Brother B Man the Mystic were fully and genuinely in tears when Rodolfo, who’d been holding up pretty well, finally turned away from Mimi and started sobbing himself, realising that she was done for. I imagine there’s lots of scope for overdoing this, but it was all the more affecting for being controlled. I massively recommend seeing this production, which is on at Covent Garden until 12 March.

The subject of crying and potentially overdoing it brings me on to Wednesday night, when I was back at Hackney Picturehouse again. This is now my third visit this month, and I’m so glad to have discovered this awesome cinema. There is a really nice bar as soon as you walk in – and there are CAKES, plus a proper menu of very delicious-looking food. If you become a member (£35 for the year) you get a discount on everything and don’t have to pay for online booking. All this is very good. I didn’t intend to go and see Tom Hooper’s new film version of the musical Les Misérables but Joshi Dreams of Sushi (an ace-looking documentary about a sushi chef) was sold out and I thought I might as well see something since I was there. I’ve seen the stage musical twice before – once in Manchester in about 1994 and once when it was still at the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus (as part of a most regrettable date). Both times I thought the music was a bit lightweight and that the whole show just seemed a bit flimsy. This film version certainly isn’t flimsy! The cinematography is sumptuously coloured and really spectacular in places, and, unencumbered by the limits of an actual stage, the director is able to use wide shots and sequences to fill in plot gaps that would only otherwise be communicated in the sung dialogue, so that helps the whole thing to feel a bit more substantial.

I was interested in two things about the casting – first that none of the actors are well-known as singers, and second, their vocal performances were captured live at the same time as their acting. This worked really well I thought, lending extra believability to vocal performances that were for the most part very convincing. Russell Crowe was the weak link in terms of singing, honking away slightly out of tune and without quite pulling off the emotion, but the other performances made up for it. Hugh Jackman was great as Jean Valjean, the hard done by bread-thief-cum-slave who makes good after a brush with the Lord and a few bloody decent actions towards his fellow man. His singing voice isn’t the most powerful, but he really, really meant it and it was hard not to be touched by his delivery. Anne Hathaway has the show’s big hit I dreamed a dream, but rather than belting it out Susan Boyle-style, she delivered it like the pathetic, delicate song that it is – and it was so much the better for it. Apparently she starved herself to get thin enough to play the role, and it was genuinely quite heartbreaking to see this skinny, filthy woman who finally crossed the line and let some awful soldier fuck her for money singing so wistfully about the better times she’d always hoped for. The camera boldly stayed right on her, close up, for the whole song and I admit I had a bit of a lump in my throat by the end of it.

There’s quite a lot to the plot – mainly involving some opera-style love at first sight, raucous slapstick from a Cockneyfied Sacha Baron Cohen as the Innkeeper and Helena Bonham Carter playing the slightly mad character she seems to play in every film she’s in, as well as quite a lot of fighting, and some serious undertones about the ghastly conditions that the poor had to endure at the time. It all ends quite triumphantly and happily though – the lovers get together, Jean VJ dies happy, there are revolutionary heroics – and the spirit, setting and acting are all there in this film version. The only thing that let it down for me was the music itself, and you can’t blame the film for that.

However, on this subject of crying. Every review you read of the film mentions that it will certainly make you cry, and there is even a video doing the rounds of some parents in a car saying they cried more at this than at some relatives’ funerals. I almost felt obliged to bloody well cry as soon as the film started. I do find this celebration of weeping pretty irritating though, as it seems to devalue the specialness of things that genuinely make me shed a tear. Anyway, the trendy boy sitting next to me had definitely received the memo because he started blubbing about 10 minutes in and barely stopped for the remaining 2 hours and 27 minutes. There were short pauses every couple of minutes or so for him to rustle around, fidget and then stuff another fistful of stinking peanut M&Ms into his Shoreditchly-moustachioed face, before one of the characters would get watery-eyed or sing something – anything – and he was off again. Honestly. I do recommend the actual cinema though – the film, yeah sure, it’s definitely worth a go, and really you don’t have to feel like you’re being an ice queen bitch if you don’t cry, I promise.

Thursday night was certainly not a weep-fest. I’d bought a pretty expensive ticket to the Royal Opera House itself to see the first night of Harrison Birtwistle’s 2008 opera The Minotaur. I wanted to see what it was like to have a really good view and be among some of the posh people (rather than practically touching the ceiling and only able to see 20% of the stage!). The opera tells the story of Asterios, the half-man-half-bull incarcerated in the labyrinth by King Minos of Crete, and to whom a sacrifice of ‘innocents’ – young men and women from Athens – is made every year. One year Theseus decides he’s had enough of this and comes over from Athens with the intention of killing this Minotaur once and for all.  The opera begins with Ariadne sitting on the beach, musing about the horror of the innocents coming over to be slaughtered. The staging is pretty sparse, but it does a great job of taking you away from any association with the modern world. You are transported to a time of myth, where strange and horrible things happen, but you accept them because there’s nothing to make it seem out of context.

After a bit of chat between Ariadne and Theseus, the innocents descend ladders into the labyrinth and the scene cuts to the middle of it, where the Minotaur stands, surrounded by a taunting Greek chorus in masks. It’s all a bit frightening. The innocents come in and the Minotaur rapes and gores them one by one, before a horrid troupe of Keres (kind of death-eater type creatures) swoop in to devour their remains. Nice. The Minotaur is tired after all his gorey-rapey action so he takes a nap and we see him dreaming. It was at this point that the opera really came alive – in his dreams Asterios believes he can speak, so we get to hear the brilliant John Tomlinson actually singing rather than just making anguished moo sounds. What I wasn’t prepared for was how sorry I would feel for the poor creature. To be fair, he was born out of a pretty dodgy situation: King Minos wanted to prove that he was the legitimate king, so he asked Poseidon (sea god) to send him a sign. Poseidon sent a white bull from the sea (sure), which Minos was to sacrifice. However Minos was so pleased with his white bull that he kept it. Poseidon was fuuuuuuriously angry to be disobeyed and as revenge made Minos’s wife develop zoophiliac desires towards the bull. She then persuaded some other guy to make her a cow suit and seduced the white bull into having sex with her. The issue was the Minotaur – half man, half bull. Shunned and rejected, full of lust and anger, neither fully man nor fully beast, and not great to look at either, poor Asterios has lived his life in torment, all the more so because the Oracle advised Minos to stick him in this horrible labyrinth underground. He dreams of the world above that he vaguely remembers, and wishes he was dead, or loved. It’s actually really sad.

Thankfully at this point it was the interval so I nipped across the road to the pub (most of the pit orchestra were there already) for a stiff drink. In the second half, Ariadne goes to visit a transvestite high Priestess with a pedantic assistant to ask for advice and they give her a big ball of red twine that she is to supply to Theseus so that he can enter the maze, paying out the twine as he goes, and use it to find his way back once he’s done in the evil freak. Before the ultimate fight scene we see the Minotaur dreaming again, and Ariadne does some slightly disturbing sex poses to a) demonstrate what her mum did with the white sea bull and b) try to seduce Theseus and persuade him to take her away from this horrid island. As you can guess, things end badly for the Minotaur as Theseus stabs him to death. In death, as in sleep, Asterios can speak, and, despite what I said about this not being a weep-fest, his final pathetic farewell had me fairly close to real tears.

Things then got quite jolly as there was rapturous applause and at the end of the curtain call – at which composer Harrison Birtwistle, librettist David Harsent and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth were present (the latter was a couple of years below me at University… he’s certainly made a more glamorous career for himself than I have!) - Tonys Hall and Pappano came on stage with a nice cake to present to John Tomlinson to celebrate the fact that 35 years ago he made his ROH debut. There was a lot of clapping to do.

I spent the journey home thinking about the very different events of the past three nights. I loved La Bohème, and Les Misérables was pretty exciting, but I think it was actually The Minotaur that touched me the most. It’s unlikely in a way: though expensive, my seat wasn’t hugely comfortable, and the person next to me was snoring all the way through; the music itself was almost impenetrable – not a single tune and no rhythms to hang onto; the story is bleak and tragic and there was a lot of blood violence and creepy wraith things eating people’s hearts; and the human characters are not very nice people – they all have a selfish agenda and say a lot of airy fairy stuff without really connecting. However, the libretto is absolutely beautiful – if I hadn’t worried that the stewards would cut my arms off for doing it, I would have whipped out my iphone at several points to note down some of the lovely, poetic lines. John Tomlinson’s singing was a huge highlight too – in his speech Tony Pappano mentioned the singer’s reputation for perfect diction and it was well-demonstrated here. His costume was also excellent, and his acting even better. Overall it was his depiction of this wretched beast that really got to me – much more than the expiry of dear Mimi or the many thou-shalt-now-cry moments in Les Misérables.

As mentioned, the culturecake project is nearing its end, or at least this phase of it is. Thank you to the kind companions who’ve joined me for my trips out. The last one will be on Sunday, when hopefully I will actually take some photos, and perhaps write a little bit less…