Grimeborn experience

Exactly ten years ago I visited Battersea Arts Centre to see eight short operas performed by Tête à Tête.

ElectrOpera staged Phedre, an ‘experimental opera using electronic music, samples and sound collage’. Once more it was hard to tell what the words were, and the samples, etc., didn’t make attractive listening by themselves. A cliché of this kind of opera is that the characters all begin by babbling, which can be quite amusing for a couple of minutes, and then someone suddenly says something intelligible, in this case, ‘I remember you,’ and it seems as if the composer has recreated speech from sound: but we have had enough of that. The four singers in this piece were highly proficient, but it outstayed its welcome, and in any case remained unclear about what it was up to.

A couple of evenings later there was a much more heartening experience. Arcola Youth Opera presented The Savage, based on a story by David Almond. The director, Thomas Hescott, had been working with a group of young local people for three weeks — people who, I think, have no theatrical ambitions or experience; and together with the composer Nick Sutton they had worked out a text and the music for four professionals to play. The story is about rejection, violence and identity. Maybe it is not less trite than that sounds, but it was performed with such disarming gusto by this cast that you couldn’t help finding it fresh and enlivening. Clearly you wouldn’t want a group like this to adopt Rada accents, but they retained their normal accents to such a degree that again I was frustrated in trying to follow exactly what they were saying. And they were, mostly, speaking, while the musicians, relegated to somewhere behind the scenes, carried on independently.

I’m not sure whether you can count it, therefore, as an opera, since the various elements didn’t interact. I’d have thought that if opera is to be created in this way, one of the first things to do would be to think of, or steal, some good tunes which the audience could go away humming — surely the first thing that will turn people on to what is still thought of as a recherché art form. Yet in what I saw this week there wasn’t even an aspiration to melody: the whole emphasis was on presenting a situation, and the musicians might as well have been playing one thing as another.