Lessons in Love and Violence at the Royal Opera

I'm currently in London, on my way back from giving some lectures in Stockholm, and trying to soak in as much art and performance as possible over my four days here. That means, in the former category, checking out the linked Tacita Dean shows at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts (in their newly renovated Burlington wing), as well as the Bacon and Freud Human, All too Human exhibition at the Tate Britain (I'm skipping the Picasso at Tate Modern). And, in terms of performance, things started off last night with Lessons in Love and Violence, a new opera by composer George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp, that is having its world premiere at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in a production directed by the uber-talented Katie Mitchell.

Benjamin and Crimp have collaborated twice before (on Into the Little Hill in 2006 and Written on Skin in 2012), and this newest work is already booked to play several major international institutions following its London run. Not a huge opera queen, I was attracted to the work not simply because of the buzz surrounding the production and the stellar reviews, but because the plot is based on the story of Edward II's tempestuous and ultimately tragic relationship with his lover and confidante Piers Gaveston. Drawing inspiration in equal measure from Christopher Marlowe and Derek Jarman, Crimp nevertheless adds to and updates the narrative by focusing on the effects of the King's all-consuming passion on his wife and children, as well as how such private emotional fissures spill over into and affect matters of national governance.

Indeed, there is a way in which Mitchell's contemporary setting of the story (aided by superb and sleekly modern designs by Vicki Mortimer) serves to make it a cautionary tale for any politician seeking to negotiate the rule of desire and the rules of politics in an age of intense social media scrutiny. Intimate scenes between the King (a stirringly soulful Stéphane Degout) and Gaveston (a dashing, though perhaps not in full voice, Gyula Orendt) leading up to their downfall, or between the Queen, Isabel (the magnificent Barbara Hannigan), and her son, now the new King (Peter Hoare, making the most of a smallish part), following that end are contrasted with large staff and media scrums in which Mitchell fills the stage with blue-suited bodies literally leaning into the anticipated bloodsport of another public figure's evisceration. That, in the final scene, Crimp gives this to us in the form of the boy-King's execution of Mortimer (an excellent Peter Hoare), the deposed military advisor who had worked to elevate him above his father, attests to how fully and completely has the young new leader absorbed the brutal lessons of power.

Benjamin, who also conducts this production, has created a score that to my untrained ear somehow feels lushly spare, and whose strings include effectively contrastive parts for the harp and what I think was a zither (both were in a box stage right of the orchestra pit). There were also several bits of percussion that stood out as especially strong moments of dramatic punctuation. At an intermissionless 95 minutes, the opera is certainly streamlined and tightly structured. But both the music and the themes make it feel substantial--and also hugely relevant.

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Best Attempts

A brief note to say that Studio 58's 2012-13 season got off to a high-octane start this week with Katrina Dunn's excellent production of British playwright Martin Crimp's 1997 Attempts on Her Life. Crimp's play is famous for the fact that its central character, Anne (also referred to variously as Annie and Anya), never appears. Nor is the audience presented with a coherent narrative of her story. Instead, over the course of 17 scenes, a company of actors gives us different--and at times competing--versions of who they believe, or rather choose to believe, this woman is. Among the possible scenarios: a character in a film script; an environmental martyr; a runaway toting stones with which to kill herself; a terrorist toting bombs with which to kill others; an anti-government survivalist; an artist-suicide/suicide artist; a porn star; a mother who may have murdered her child; a pop music groupie; and a high performance sports car.

Moreover, because the dialogue in Crimp's script is not assigned to designated secondary characters, with changes in speaker indicated only by a dash, it is left up to the director and her company how best to divvy up the commentary on Anne, and to imagine the different personae issuing said commentary. Dunn and her talented cast are more than up to the task, creating a Rashomon-like portrait for our paradoxically faceless Facebook age that nevertheless contains abundant moments of real emotional connection; that makes a virtue of the play's episodic structure through choreographed movement and high energy physical theatre within and between scenes; and that cannily employs digital technology without becoming enslaved to it. Especially effective, in this regard, is the opening scene, in which a series of phone messages to Anne is repeated in voice-over as the actors, one by one, turn on their cell phones, using the illuminated displays like individual follow-spots of differently coloured washes, as they move in successive patterns about the stage.

Kudos must also be extended to scenographer David Roberts for his superb set, configured as an airport terminal waiting lounge, complete with a set of automatic sliding doors that also double as the audience's entrance to the theatre. In fact, we soon learn that they are not motion sensitive, as we suspect, but are being controlled instead by technicians in the booth, who keep us waiting for a few extra minutes outside, peering in through the doors and an accompanying window at what we think we are missing. Which, it must be said, is a lot, as most of the company is already assembled on stage, staking out their territory in relation to each other, and to us, and presumably to the multiple intertexts that make up Anne. Waiting, in other words, to take off on what promises to be a wild and exciting ride into the unknown.

I thoroughly enjoyed the ride, and look forward to Dunn's next directing project for her own company, Touchstone: a production of Anton Piatigorsky's modernist literary whodunit, Eternal Hydra, on at Studio 17 from November 1-11.

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Theatre Down Under

Just back from Australia, where the marathoning was disappointing and painful (2 minutes off my target time and a throbbing right leg throughout due to a calf injury sustained two days before), but the scuba diving fantastic and awe-inspiring (nothing like making the Great Barrier Reef the site of one's first dive).

As for the theatre in Sydney, it was hit and miss. A preview performance of Martin Crimp's latest one-act play, The City, at the Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf 2 stage was underwhelming. A cross between Pinter (the fact that Chris becomes a butcher after losing his job is a dead giveaway) and the more metatheatrical Pirandello, the play situates family dysfunction within a surreal and symbolical framework of literary invention. Opening with translator Claire's story of a foreign author's abandonment of his child, the play ends by suggesting that Claire has appropriated both the story and the child (who makes an appearance at one point, playing the piano and reciting dirty limericks) as her own. A not terribly original linking of biological and literary procreation made all the more confusing by the seemingly pointless introduction of the Jenny character, a nurse/neighbour who totters precariously around a stage made up of a series of steep risers on high heels. The adult performers were all very sharp, but the child actor could not project, and she seemed unsure of how to negotiate the obstacle-course-of-a-stage. My exhaustion at trying to follow the plot was compounded by jet lag and an overheated auditorium, and not surprisingly I found myself nodding off towards the end of what was only an 80-minute performance.

Much better was Company B's production of Ruben Guthrie at the Belvoir Street Theatre the next evening (Company B and BST originated the revival of Ionesco's Exit the King with Geoffrey Rush that recently played on Broadway). Brendan Cowell's corrosive exploration of youthful success and excess, the play focuses on the eponymous Ruben, a whiz-kid advertising executive whose over-indulgent penchant for booze and pills leads to him thinking he can fly one particular evening. A chastened Ruben, having lost his Czech model girlfriend as a result of this latest antic, agrees to join a recovery program. As Ruben gradually internalizes, with help from his sponsor (who eventually becomes his new girlfriend), the lessons of AA, he starts to alienate friends and family: his father, himself an alcoholic, who thinks it's un-Australian to refuse a drink; his mother, who after encouraging him to join AA in the first place now thinks the program has turned him into a zombie; his boss, who claims Ruben has lost his creative spark now that he's sober; and his best friend, newly returned from New York and wondering what pod person has suddenly replaced his former drinking mate. Sharply paced and bitingly funny, the production features a career-making performance by Toby Schmitz as Ruben. I now understand why people say Company B is Australia's leading theatre company.

I had booked to see another play, The Elling, at STC my last night in Sydney, but then I injured my calf, so I opted to rest in my hotel room instead. A fat lot of good that did me two days later on the Gold Coast.

Oh well, at least the coral and fish were pretty.

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