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Friday 9 January 2009

Great Britten

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Opera North, Manchester

Powder Her Face
Royal Opera, Linbury

With all this semi-supernatural unsavouriness, the rustics are what I never envisaged their being: a welcome chunk of decency and guilelessness. Played as straight as they can be, they not only amuse, they are also moving (as well as touching). The strange quality of creepy sophistication manifested everywhere else in the work is ‘placed’ by them, and Britten turns out, to my plodding consciousness, to have made another assault on his eternal obsession about the relationship of innocence and experience.

And talking of creepy sophistication, how much more of those qualities could you find in a single opera than in Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face? Produced at the Linbury by the Royal Opera, it boasts a set which might have sent Noël Coward into fatal shivers of agony and ecstasy; a fanned-out flight of chic stairs, with gigantic cosmetic instruments and the Duchess of Argyll reposing in the centre of a man-sized powder puff. Joan Rodgers acted the part exactly as she acted Poulenc’s La voix humaine two years ago, animatedly and with 100 per cent verbal unintelligibility. Where Poulenc can, in his piece, be harrowing and insightful (though that production wasn’t), Adès here seems heartless and bent only on the all-too-famous climax, here rendered puzzling because in response to Rodgers’s frenetic fellation (surely there is someone involved in the work who knows that the secret is relaxation) a nude male, full-frontal but evidently not all that affected by her efforts, reared up between the Duchess and the Waiter and then slid from view. The music chattered on cleverly, but bored me — and not in a sophisticated way.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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