Opera Review: WNO's La bohème at Bristol Hippodrome

This review was written for The Reviews Hub

Welsh National Opera (WNO)’s evocative 2012 production of Puccini’s La bohème returns to the stage for a well-deserved revival, as part of the company’s Love’s Poisoned Chalice season. Here, Annabel Arden’s original combination of strong vocal performances, atmospheric staging and clear storytelling is continued under the direction of Caroline Chaney.

In a fin de siècle Paris recreated from projected rooftops and star-lit skies, the poet Rodolfo and seamstress Mimi, both penniless, meet on Christmas Eve and fall in love. There’s an instant chemistry between Jessica Muirhead’s Mimi and Matteo Lippi’s Rodolfo that convinces from the start; both are dramatically and vocally assured, as they combine with passion in the duet O Soave Fanciulla (Oh Loveliest of Maidens). Muirhead’s sweet soprano soars above the orchestra with a celestial purity that foreshadows her demise, while Lippi embraces the complex range required for an empathetic portrayal of Rodolfo.

To celebrate, they leave the humble garret Rodolfo shares with his fellow bohemians and join the warmth and excitement of Café Momus in the Latin quarter. Here, Rodolfo’s artist friend Marcello is reunited with his former love Musetta, who has tired of her elderly, rich admirer. In this most tempestuous of relationships, Gary Griffiths as Marcello is a charismatic presence, well matched with the flirtations of Lauren Fagan’s spirited Musetta, who waits until the final Act to reveal her tenderness of heart.

There are delightful supporting performances from Jihoon Kim as the philosopher Colline and Gareth Brynmor John as the musician Shaunard, who provide a palpable sense of friendship and joie de vivre alongside their technical skill. Act II in the Café Momus is a visual feast, festooned with coloured lights. WNO’s always admirable chorus is richly detailed and augmented by the lively, skittering presence of a group of children, in thrall to the toy seller Parpignol (Michael Clifton-Thompson) and his wares.

Design and lighting by Stephen Brimson Lewis and Tim Mitchell contrast the riotous colour of the café with the snowy austerity of the tollgate in Act III, as Mimi and Rodolfo’s relationship sours under the weight of his unwarranted jealousy. Conductor Manlio Benzi’s interpretation ensures that WNO’s orchestra always enhances the rousing emotions on stage, as Mimi’s illness takes hold and she is reunited in Act IV with Rodolfo and his friends for one final, fleeting time.

WNO’s La bohème may not push the boundaries of what opera can do, but its traditional retelling focuses on the beauty of Puccini’s score and vividly brings to life the tragedy of the lovers’ story. This is a memorable revival that sates the senses, imprinting in the mind both the searing joy of friendship and love and the poignancy of loss.

Reviewed on 29 March 2017 | Image: Robert Workman

Theatre Review: What The Butler Saw at Theatre Royal, Bath

This review was first written for The Reviews Hub

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton’s death, and this brand-new version of What the Butler Saw, a joint production between Theatre Royal Bath and Leicester Curve, commemorates his final full-length play. But as a dark farce, this work is now showing its age; shocking at the time for its anti-establishment sentiment, today the aspect that strikes the most jarring note is the inherent sexism and gender stereotyping of the 1960s.

Viewed through this filter, there’s still enjoyment in a story that takes place entirely in the white box of a psychiatrist’s clinic. Here, the initial calm and order quickly descend into mayhem, as Dr. Prentice’s attempted seduction of his new secretary is thwarted by the untimely arrival of his voracious wife, fresh from her own suspect dalliance with a bell-boy in a linen cupboard.

Characteristically, it’s the cover-up that provides the greatest comedy; the handiest solution to most problems being to adopt a cross-dressing disguise that involves plenty of farcical stripping-off and trouser-dropping. A vase becomes a useful receptacle for all manner of clothing and there are moments of exquisite hilarity with the flowers it should innocently contain. Doors are entered and exited at great speed. Throw in a maniacal government analyst, a none-too-observant police sergeant and a diagnosis of insanity; the accompanying strait-jackets, guns and bloodshed all provide a galloping inevitability.

Orton’s text is dense with fast-paced words and wit and – apart from one or two fluffed lines in this performance – the timing in Nikolai Foster’s production is generally immaculate. Rufus Hound and Catherine Russell as Dr. and Mrs. Prentice are well matched in both sexual predilection and quick delivery, while Jasper Britton revels in his role as Dr. Rance, the single-minded spin-doctor of a pre-determined outcome: ‘I’m not interested in your explanations, I can supply my own!’ Dakota Blue Richards is a study in the downward spiral from enthusiastic young employee to gibbering, casually abused wreck.

Michael Taylor’s curved, raked set is a thing of beauty; adapting first to the width of Leicester’s Curve Theatre and now the traditional proscenium in Bath, it accommodates the unfolding story – and its requirement for doors to burst in and out of – while denying any specific time frame.

If only the narrative of this otherwise plot-driven, witty work could do the same. What must have been subversive in the 1960s verges on jaded in the twenty-first Century and its relevance is hard to discern. In this unadulterated form, What the Butler Saw resembles a misogynistic period piece lacking context, presenting rape as an acceptable extension of intense sexual desire and incest as its jolly consequence. The fine performances and clearly delivered merriment may still find an appeal with lovers of the genre, but ultimately this farce feels uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons.

Reviewed on 28 March 2017 | Image: Contributed

Book Review: Faithless by Kjell Ola Dahl

Kjell Ola Dahl is known as one of the founding fathers of Nordic Noir but, unlike the widely translated thrillers of Jo Nesbø or Henning Mankell, opportunities to read his crime fiction in English have been limited. Now Faithless, a new translation by Don Bartlett of one of Dahl's best known Gunnarstranda and Frølich series, takes a step towards bringing his complex, twisty police procedurals to a wider audience.

Inspector Frank Frølich of the Oslo police is devastated when the victim of a brutal murder is identified as Veronika, fiancée of his oldest friend, Karl Anders. His colleague Gunnarstranda is brought back early from holiday and, as the investigation takes shape, lines between the personal and professional are increasingly blurred. Karl Anders' alibi doesn't seem to stack up and his relationship with the dead woman is far from straightforward. There are secrets she was withholding that the police must uncover to find her killer.

Why was Veronika arrested shortly before her death on a drugs charge? Who is the unidentified man who seems to have been stalking her? And is there any connection to a similar murder several years earlier in northern Norway? The possibility that the police have a serial killer on their hands adds even greater urgency to finding him before he has the chance to strike again.

Meanwhile, Frølich also has to grapple with the case of a beautiful young Ugandan student, who arrived in Norway to attend a university summer school but quickly went missing. Under pressure to downgrade the importance of this investigation, he finds it dredging up distressing memories of a night many years ago, that led to his long estrangement from Karl Anders.

As Faithless is not the first book in the series, there's an established back story to the flawed relationships between the characters: Frølich, Gunnarstranda, and their co-workers Lena Stigersand, Mustafa Rindal and Emil Yttergjerde. Their methods of policing rely heavily on instinct; they gossip between themselves and try to palm off the banalest of tasks. Yttergjerde is routinely too busy studying the pictures in Autocar to answer the phone. The bubbling undercurrents become clearly discernible as you read, and the novel still works as a standalone.

The narrative crackles with atmosphere; the oppressive heat and long sunshine hours of an unusually warm Norwegian summer swelter and daze its protagonists, only breaking in a symbolically dramatic storm towards the end. And, reminiscent of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus thrillers, music adds an important element;  Frølich listens to the Dandy Warhols while Gunnarstranda favours Mack the Knife as sung by Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Buffett. 

Faithless is an elaborately plotted, well-constructed and gratifying read that questions the basis of friendship and reflects on wrong actions being taken for the right reasons. Dahl always has a confident grasp of his material, even while he is demonstrating the eggshell-thin fragility of the line between good and evil.

Faithless by Kjell Ola Dahl (translated by Don Bartlett) is published by Orenda Books in ebook and paperback format on 15 May 2017. Many thanks to Karen at Orenda for my review copy. 

Theatre Review: Escaped Alone at Bristol Old Vic

This review was first written for The Reviews Hub

It’s all too easy to dismiss four women of 70 years or more, sitting in a garden on a summer’s afternoon. At this time of life, women are often condemned to a cloak of creeping invisibility – good for a little childcare, but otherwise functionally irrelevant. In a compelling 50 minutes, Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone turns this trope on its head; enriching her all-female cast with profound interior lives and the jaggedly recurrent theme of an apocalypse, as told by an elderly woman sporting baggy leggings and a self-inflicted haircut.

It begins with Linda Bassett as the seemingly unshakeable Mrs Jarrett, spotting three women she vaguely knows behind a high garden fence, and popping through the gate to join them. After hardly a murmur, she’s accepted by the others; Deborah Findlay’s Sally, who used to work in medicine but whose charming exterior masks an extreme aversion to cats; phlegmatic ex-hairdresser Vi (June Watson), who doesn’t like kitchens any more for murderous reasons that will become apparent and shy retired office worker Lena (Kika Markham), who thinks it would be better to be in an empty room because ‘then there’s fewer things to mean nothing at all’.

Under a blue sky, they sit and chat about grand-children and TV serials, but their conversation is elliptical, sentences unfinished and pauses non-naturalistic. Then, as the others fade away into darkness, each woman has their own moment in the spotlight to portray their innermost thoughts and deepest anxieties. When it’s her turn, Mrs Jarrett is the least articulate, only able to utter of her ‘terrible rage’.

Her words, it seems, have already been spat out in the episodic retellings that punctuate proceedings; director James Macdonald combines with designer Miriam Buether, as he did in The Father, to create a sharp blackness framed by a coil of sputtering light, in stark contrast to the serenity of the garden. Here, Mrs Jarrett speaks of an apocalypse; ‘songs were sung until dry throats caused the end of speech’; ‘the obese sold slices of themselves until hunger drove them to eat their own rashers’. She conjures up a dystopia that Margaret Atwood might be proud of, but a bewildering one; is this a parallel universe or a prediction of future destruction? Churchill leaves it to her audience to decide.

As an established director of her plays, Macdonald knows how to bring out Churchill’s playful moments, too; in one joyous scene, the perfectly attuned cast sing The Crystals’ 1960s hit Da Doo Ron Ron, as well as discussing aspirations of flying to Japan. These women possess authority, look forwards as well as backwards in their lives and encompass both the domestic and the anarchic. Escaped Alone may be short, often perplexing and obscure, but long after you’ve left the theatre, it still contains a whole world of complexity to contemplate.

Reviewed on 22 March 2017 | Image: Johan Persson