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Inspiration in a factory

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

King Idomeneo
Birmingham

Osud
Royal Albert Hall

Graham Vick was, as usual, the inspiration and director of the proceedings. The sell-out audiences show how successful, and deservedly so, he is. Yet I wonder if one — anyone — does finally get into a closer, more concentrated relationship to a complex work by having its action dispersed over a large space, so that the audience has to spot where the next bit is going to happen. A static, fairly narrow acting space may distance us, but doesn’t it also save us from distraction, enable us to absorb what is taking place, educate us into expecting certain conventions to be observed, which are the way into such a highly wrought masterwork? I realise that a community project can hardly abide by the usual theatrical rules, but did the many citizens who participated in a marginal way get to know the piece better than they would have done if they had sat and watched it, perhaps been told about it and the myth from which it was made, and so on? I ask in a spirit of fervent admiration for what Vick and his teams accomplish, but I would like to know.

The Proms mounted Fate (but why call it Osud, when the characters refer only to ‘Fatum’?), Janacek’s problem opera, and it came over very well as a great musical experience. That is probably all it can come over as, but, though someone was credited with a concert staging, that was confined to exits and entrances, and the positioning of mad Mother some way up the stairs, which may have accounted for Rosalind Plowright’s disastrous missed screams and interjections. Jiri Belohlavek conducted with the intensity which the piece demands. I think it is almost certainly a failure, but the music is so consistently inspired, more so than in some of the dramatically more cogent later operas, that any lover of this extraordinary isolated genius must place it at the centre of his output.