Indigestible fare

It isn’t often that we get the chance to see a semi-opera, of which Purcell and Dryden’s King Arthur is a paradigm. And after seeing a competent production in Bury St Edmunds last week, I can’t say that I regret the infrequency of performances. This one was in the enchanting setting of the Theatre Royal, very recently restored and quite magnificent, a tiny theatre with excellent acoustics, and a fine example of English rococo. The production was a joint one with three German theatres, one of them the still more exquisite Markgrave’s Opera House in Bayreuth. The cast was of native English speakers, and the German audiences would have had an industrious evening reading the surtitles, for there is a vast acreage of text. The director Colin Blumenau explains in the programme that King Arthur is a work of some complexity, not just the epic story of Arthur repelling the last of the recalcitrant Saxons and finally achieving union with his beloved Emmeline.

It is a work of allegory, a form in which contemporary audiences — or perhaps I should speak only for myself — aren’t proficient. We have been taught, of course, to look for ‘deeper layers’ or ‘darker sides’ of artists’ works, but they only give us a thrill if they somehow escape from the creators’ control, at least partially. Dryden was an adept at political satire and allegory, but in his masterpiece Absalom and Achitophel the satirical intent is impossible to ignore; while the truth about King Arthur is that the text is of such numbing tedium that one exhausts all one’s resources in maintaining concentration, and then finds that there is very little reward.