La Bohème at Hackney
Picture House
Visited on Tuesday 15 January 2013
Les Misérables at
Hackney Picture House
Visited on Wednesday 16 January 2013
The Minotaur at Royal
Opera House
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…
