Michael Tanner

One of Grimeborn’s most striking rediscoveries: Mozart & Salieri at the Arcola Theatre reviewed

Mozart & Salieri
Grimeborn, Arcola Theatre, until 13 August

I have been a fairly conscientious reviewer of Dalston’s Grimeborn festival for the last eight years. The name is less suitable now than it was. The Arcola Theatre, where the operas are performed, is now only a stone’s throw from Dalston Square, with its chic apartment blocks and bars and the resplendent C.L.R. James library, and the whole neighbourhood is upwardly mobile.

The Arcola itself remains a ramshackle place, and you can expect the usual late start, inadequate provision of programmes, and general air of administrative amateurism. This year’s season began on 23 July, and runs till 8 September. Some of the operas are familiar, though likely to be staged in an unusual way, and with drastically reduced accompaniment. So far this year I have seen Rimsky-Korsakov’s rare Mozart & Salieri. It is a setting of one of Pushkin’s ‘little tragedies’, and may be responsible for the despicable and in all ways deplorable play and film Amadeus, though Salieri is portrayed as more sympathetic here.

The programme states that ‘this immersive character of the production aims to put the audience in the centre of the action’, but it seemed just like Arcola’s usual productions to me: the steeply raked seating stops just short of the performance area, but that is common to everything done there, and indeed to other shoestring companies. It’s a fine production, but no more ‘immersive’, whatever that may be, than I am used to in many theatres.

To update Mozart and Salieri, as this production does, with Salieri wearing casual contemporary clothes, and Mozart dated only by a periwig, seems silly, but the contemporary operatic climate inures one to that.

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