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Reflexive and reflective

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Punch and Judy
Linbury Studio

La vie parisienne
Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy is very much a piece of its time, the late 1960s, but returning to it after many years I was pleasantly surprised to find how much of it remains fresh and invigorating. Music Theatre Wales mounted three performances at the Linbury, and in a few weeks there will be a new production of it by ENO. It seemed to fit perfectly into the limited space of the Linbury, the orchestra behind the stage, and it has enough of the feel of a fairground entertainment to make the idea of it in a large and more formal setting odd, but we can only hope for a fascinating transformation.

I had remembered it as a pretty relentlessly strident work, but my memory was agreeably wrong. Alternating with the savagery and the excess-energy thumping there is a lot of lyrical, gentle, melodious music, though I didn’t emerge from the depths humming any tunes. One of the virtues of MTW’s production, though, as opposed to what I recall of previous ones, is that it was done as a repertory piece, not as a defiant contribution to avant-garde theatre. The performers are veterans in their roles, and I’d like to write about their individual merits, but I can only single out Gwion Thomas’s classic Punch, just the right mixture of geniality and threat, indolent lust and restlessness, and with a finely projected singing voice; and Jeremy Huw Williams as Choregos, the narrator-cum-commentator as well as Jack Ketch the hangman: this narrator has quite a say in the way things go, and Williams has a look of crafty complicity which will be hard for anyone to equal. There wasn’t even the hint of a weak link, and in this time when every routine operatic staging is DVD’d this one should be immortalised in that form now, to set standards.

It would be idle to claim that the piece doesn’t present problems, but they are so outnumbered by its evident successes that it would be a mean spirit that harped on them. The librettist Stephen Pruslin does seem to have been just the wrong person to work with Birtwistle, in that both of them want anything they do to be about Everything, as if music theatre should take Finnegans Wake as its model, instead of learning from that disaster a modesty of aim. David Beard writes, in the illuminating programme notes, ‘Arguably, Birtwistle was more interested in the mechanisms of theatre and ways in which to assemble the story’s elements than the story itself. Consequently the opera’s structure is cyclic and symmetrical,’ but also ‘Punch’s recognition of Judy (a device known in Greek tragedy as anagnorisis) prompts a plot reversal (or peripeteia) and the Melodrama/Passion Chorale/Quest formula is reversed’, and so on. Nothing happens without reflections on what it means for it to happen, a key to mythologies, while there is plenty of ironic gambolling going on to show that, if you think there is only one thing that is meant, think again, because the opposite is meant too. With that amount of reflexiveness and reflectiveness the sheer claim that there is a narrative thread which predominates seems absurd. Perhaps this is only getting us into training for The Minotaur, which receives its world première at the Royal Opera next month. Meanwhile, we had better do our homework, while recalling that despite all this barrage of pre-interpretation Birtwistle is a remarkable composer whose musical inspirations invade his pretensions often enough to make the effort worthwhile.

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