English Touring Opera review – opera so bleak reality seems like bliss

Depressed by another coronavirus lockdown? Behind the curve in the queue for the vaccine? Stuck in Category 17, with a projected jab date sometime in 2023? Never mind. Cheer up.

Many opera companies have seen it as their civic duty to cheer us up. Online roistering concerts, box-windowed Zooms, cellists performing in their closets, sopranos cracking the bathroom mirrors, basso profundos shaking their very cellars to the foundations. Did not English National Opera give us an upbeat Notting Hill drive-in la Bohème, complete with hippy rappers and VW camper vans?

English Touring Opera has taken a different route, offering a quixotic antidote all its own. Plumbing the depths of depression so that re-emerging from the performances on offer into a world of over-stretched intensive care units, 60,000 Covid-19 cases a day, shuttered schools and a never-never vaccine, seems like light relief. Bliss is it in that escape to be alive!

The Heart’s Assurance, by war poets Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis, set to music by Sir Michael Tippett and A Charm of Lullabies, based on poems of William Blake, Robert Burns, Robert Greene, Thomas Randolph and John Phillip, set to music by Benjamin Britten, are both works aimed at setting the senses on edge. Perhaps overwhelming them. This season, English Touring Opera (ETO) reminds us things could be worse. Much worse.

Keyes and Lewis – both died in WWII action – were war poets who homed in on the devastation war brings at a granular level to combatants, the dismantling of personal relationships and the destruction of individuals starved of the routine banalities that sustain us in normal times. If war were physics, these poets would be the particle physicists, blasting characters apart in the Hadron Collider of conflict, then raking over the pieces that remained. Tippett and Britten provide haunting musical backdrops. Both works are heart-wrenching. Both are important. This is “pay attention” art, in spades.

The Heart’s Assurance – based on Keyes and Lewis poems – is presented as a monologue, sung by a serving soldier, but in the presence of an ill-defined “other” who reacts to the sung verse. The lines are powerful: “And though death taps down the street, as familiar as any postman on his beat”. “O, never trust the heart’s assurance, trust only the heart’s fear”. Both poets had borne witness to dehumanising atrocity.

Thomas Elwin, tenor, is competent enough, but comparison with the definitive 1950 recording of the piece featuring Peter Pears, suggests that his focus on technique, compared with Pear’s blatant, showboating theatricality, misses the point. Elwin is in control. The Keyes/Lewis character portrayed by Pears has lost it.

Richard Dowling, the actor foil to Elwin, loomed impressively, acting out the emotions in the verse, but it remained uncertain what he was for, or, indeed, who he was. Alter ego? Lost gay lover? Guy hanging around the barracks, folding his bedding?

The director, Bernadette Iglich, left it up in the air. Ms. Iglich is a dance performer, so perhaps she simply saw a space that had to be filled and had Richard Dowling fill it. Production value necessities. I found it an annoying distraction.

James Conway has been director of ETO for seventeen years and his experience showed in his deft handling of A Charm of Lullabies.

Benjamin Britten’s invention of the collective. “Charm,” is cynically oxymoronic as the soloist, mezzo Katie Stevenson, who sits on what’s eventually revealed as a pile of ghoulish, discarded dolls, is plain scary. No charm on offer.

Portrayed as a gangling Heidi, complete with pinafore, white socks, sandals and pigtail, all that’s missing is her head not spinning on its axis, Exorcist fashion. “Sleep! Sleep! Beauty bright, dreaming o’er the joys of night”, Ms Stevenson intones, imparting a rictus grin that would scare the socks off you. No fear. “Sleep” is her wake up call.

“He was glad, I was woe; fortune changed, made him so”, is, on the face of it, a song lamenting a lost love. But the sight of Ms Stevenson flourishing a doll by the ankles while spitting vitriol makes it clear who lost that argument. Ms Stevenson has performed a number of “debut” roles with the English National Opera. On the strength of this virtuoso performance, she will be much in demand once normal performances resume.

Piano accompaniment was ably provided by Ian Tindale. The Tippett piece is particularly demanding, its complex runs requiring not only technical skill, but reckless panache to deliver the full, fluent effect. Mr Tindale’s delivery was seamless. He does not allow the security of his technique to detract from the colour he drives from the keyboard.

This ETO-Covid offering is not for the fainthearted. With a dollop of a health warning, you can watch it on Marquee TV here. But keep clear of open windows, ledges and heights. This is heap powerful medicine.