Scottish Opera’s The Gondoliers review – live opera is coming home
Scottish Opera’s bargain pop-up, The Gondoliers, didn’t so much fall off the back of a lorry. It was on a lorry. The lorry was in a field. The field was set in a rolling Scottish Borders landscape. The River Teviot burbled on the margins.
This was Harestanes, a woodland complex of craft shops and cafes on Monteviot Estate, near Jedburgh. I was wriggling on a folding chair, contained by a social distancing blue hula hoop laid on the ground.
Soon, the audience of 30 or so, all hula-hooped, risk being in Venice along with the gondoliers. For the clouds are turning Turner black. Torrential rain is threatening. The pessimistic lightning tracker App on my phone crackles a warning. Have I chanced upon Scottish Opera’s Gotterdammerung?
Then, the sun broke through, and there was noticeable relief all around. Welcome back to live performance – with a difference. English National Opera may boast of its drive-in La Bohème at Alexandra Palace. Scottish Opera drives to you. A sort of DeliverOperoo, wherever you are. This pop-up Gilbert and Sullivan series of favourites was on a thirty-four-destination whistle-stop whizz around Scotland. Difficult to miss it. I nearly did.
Spool back. It’s 7 am. From the shower, is that a plummy BBC Radio 3 continuity voice I caught announcing an opera in Harestanes – a mere mile away? I must have misheard — another Harestanes. Then, the voice intoned fruitily “in the lee of Peniel Heugh, a monument to celebrate the victory of the Duke of Wellington over Napoleon at Waterloo”.
That’s here! I can see the stone column from the bedroom window. It was erected between 1817 and 1824 by the grateful tenantry of Lothian Estates to mark the Iron Duke’s victory. A far cry from today when mobs bay to tear monuments down. Never mind that Mr Continuity urbanely pronounced it “Huck”, not “Heeooch”. Unmistakable. Live opera was coming home.
A two-click £5 PayPal transaction and I was in. I couldn’t help noticing the generous discount for four – group rate, £20. Do the math. There’s Scottish Opera thriftiness for you.
How does this pop-up series work? Park a gleaming white six-wheeler behemoth in a field, shopping centre, car park, someone’s back garden, whatever. Whip back the side screen running the lorry’s length and – Robert being the husband of your father’s sister – you are post-Covid live. Stuff Zoom.
After 18 months, we have scenery, wings, a sound system, performance. Voices. Musical instruments. Not many. OK, two! Both guitarist and cellist had to remain out of sight behind the side screen during the performance, “in case it rained”. Maybe de minimis. So what? Good, was it in that potentially drenched field to be live.
It sounds makeshift – anything but. The production was a slick thirty-minute compression of The Gondoliers greatest hits. And the plot emerged whole – like a production from The Reduced Shakespeare Company. If you prefer your malt whisky without water, this was the opera for you – concentrated.
Here’s the setup. The closed side of the lorry is a painted background set with a generic scene appropriate for any of the five operas on offer. Stage left was a baritone Gondolier. Stage right, we have a soprano Princess, doubling as an occasional simple peasant.
Centre stage, a breezy storyteller, rules over a sophisticated theatrical device, an artist’s easel, plus a Rolodex of large paintings. That’s it. As he delivered his patter, the storyteller deftly places the paintings one after the other on the easel, unfolding the plot.
The banter was razor-sharp. The storyteller spooled through the synopsis, turning left or right, introducing arias and duets, which then took on the narrative. Who was the Storyteller? That would be Allan Dunn, an Edinburgh based actor, writer and librettist, with a deadpan delivery and pawky sense of humour. Mr Dunn scored a hattrick as Librettist and Director as well.
Andrew MacTaggart, a baritone trained at The Alexander Gibson Opera School of the Scottish Conservatoire in Glasgow, gamely took on all gondoliere and other male character duties. An experienced stage performer, he not only had a fluent voice – he has performed in many roles for Scottish Opera – but a talent for dynamic interaction with the Storyteller.
Soprano Stephanie Stanway, also a Gibson graduate, has an eclectic range of opera roles on her repertoire scorecard. Her voice is light, which suited the gamine performance required.
Scottish Opera is blessed with a cohort of unpretentious performers. We field viewers can count ourselves fortunate that Ms Stanway and Mr McTaggart did not stamp their feet, demanding an actual opera house in which to display their talents.
This travelling opera series has thirty-four stops on its tour of Scotland, offering “A Little Bit of” five Gilbert and Sullivan favourites – HMS Pinafore, The Mikado, Iolanthe, The Pirates of Penzance and, of course, The Gondoliers. It is not just a case of climb every mountain. The roadshow even braves that redoubtable Scottish maritime rust bucket operator Caledonian MacBrayne, to ferry the lorry and support vehicles across the Minch to the Isle of Lewis.
I do hope the good folk of Bragar, a village 14 miles from Lewis’ only town, Stornoway, will be suitably impressed on 29th July as Scottish Opera’s giant pantechnicon thunders across the island to their newly minted Grinneabhat centre. Never mind the opera. Book your passing place slot on the island’s single-track roads now.
Grinneabhat knows how to tempt the tourist. The centre’s website boasts not of delights distant from opera but, “Coming Soon: Launderette and 4 x en-suite rooms for 12 people”. Haud me back! Whatever the Hebridean weather, Pinafore and Pirates will pack them in. More exciting than My Beautiful Laundrette, doubtless screening later.
Scottish Opera’s mission has ever been to reach out from its home in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, taking opera to places in Scotland other artforms never reach. Brave? Foolhardy? A bunch of singing Don Quixotes tilting against the windmills of cultural Philistines?
Most opera companies nowadays boast programmes encouraging youth, introducing the art form to a new generation. The greying of audiences is a ubiquitous preoccupation. Scottish Opera goes, literally, that extra mile.
This Gilbert and Sullivan pop up series is accessible, adroitly staged, performed with skill and – within the limits of any lorry-based production – artistically sound. It brought a smile to the faces of the audience and cast alike. A great teaser for delving further into the world of opera.
The cast took their bows, sauntered from field to coffee shop with a skip in their gait, leaving their team of roadies to rejig the lorry for the 2:30 pm Mikado. It started to rain. Entirely in the interests of Reaction readers, I decided to review the merits of the Cross Keys local pub instead. Too much live opera in one day can addle the brain.