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Entranced by Janacek

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 9th July 2008

The Cunning Little Vixen
Royal College of Music

Candide
English National Opera

Not, alas, from the Coliseum and the glitzy production of Bernstein’s Candide. Actually, the flashiness of the show was its strongest feature, and the contrast between this slickness and the slack tackiness of Kismet last year, nadir of ENO’s trawling of the musical depths, couldn’t be greater. This show is shared with the Châtelet and the Scala, Milan, and staged by Robert Carsen. Staged as a giant TV show, the overture is immensely enjoyable, not the high-kicking music, but the Fifties footage of the Kennedys, Marilyn, and the rest of what we thought of as the ambience of life in the United States then. Less to my taste — but I’m in a minority — is the arch narration of Alex Jennings, dressed as Voltaire and elocuting in that way that drollness in musicals seems to dictate. He also plays Pangloss and Martin, much better. Yet the tiresome manner indicates something about the whole show, not only this production of it but Bernstein’s own conception, perhaps showing why he could never settle on a version of it that satisfied him. A satirist needs a hard heart, or the successful pretence that that is what he has, and a rigorous abstention from serious moralising within his satire. Voltaire in this version lapses into earnestness, fails to maintain the chilly detachment that he affects. Just so with the show, which tries to be cold, but melts embarrassingly into the schmaltz of ‘It must be so’ and ‘Make our gardens grow’.

The cast is capable, though amplification doesn’t do their voices any favours. The title role suits Toby Spence well, something that might give him mild cause for concern. Going late in the run, I saw Marnie Breckenridge (pity the spelling is slightly different from that of her great near-namesake) as Cunegonde. She is a capable actress, but squalls, and ‘Glitter and be gay’ was almost painful. The inadequacies of what is in many ways a smart and stylish production could be easily overlooked if Carsen hadn’t indulged himself in such an acreage of dialogue, much of it neither amusing nor relevant to the progress of the narrative. He seems to have thought that a scattershot approach would be best, but the result is that this just feels like a not-witty-enough anti-American diatribe into which music occasionally and incongruously intrudes.