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Classical
Fidelio
5 stars Andrew
Clements Monday March 11, 2002
Birmingham Opera Company
evolved out of City of Birmingham Touring Opera two years ago. Graham Vick
remained the company's artistic director, but the new name signalled an
intent to concentrate on site-specific and community-based projects in the
city. BOC's first production, of Berg's Wozzeck, was presented a year ago
in a warehouse.
Now Vick has directed Fidelio in a gigantic circus tent pitched in the
grounds of Aston Hall, within spitting distance of Villa Park stadium. It
is a remarkable achievement that shows how community opera, a slippery,
difficult concept at the best of times, can be an immensely powerful and
intellectually challenging medium.
This Fidelio is as much an installation as a conventional staging of
Beethoven's opera. The music (conducted by William Lacey) and drama (in
David Pountney's English translation) are firmly at the heart of the show.
Julian Grant's hugely imaginative arrangement for 16-piece orchestra never
for a moment lacks the weight and incisiveness of the original scoring.
Around that core, though, Vick has created a vast and all-embracing
evening of theatre, involving more than 100 local amateurs, who provide
the chorus and portray the myriad extra characters.
Paul Brown has designed the environment, which aims to draw the
audience into the exploration of the opera's themes of freedom and
repression. They are moved around the performing space by "security staff"
as scenes develop around them. To enter the main tent, everyone has to
walk over a dungeon crammed with blindfolded prisoners. The first scene
takes place at the end of a wedding reception; Jaquino (John Upperton) and
Marzelline (Donna Bateman) have their tiff on a row of washing machines.
Guests move through the audience carrying on their own dramas, and Rocco
(Jonathan Best, superbly seedy and credible) strolls around to deliver his
personal credo.
So the production continues, seamlessly and enthrallingly. Before the
Prisoner's Chorus everyone is herded together in semi-darkness to hear
Jane Leslie MacKenzie sing Leonore's great aria, and then asked to walk
into the light just as the prisoners celebrate their taste of fresh air.
The audience put black bags on their heads to simulate the sensory
deprivation of Florestan (Ronald Samm), chained to a tree. It's hard to
convey the power these ideas acquire in the context of this astonishingly
committed and brilliantly choreographed performance, or the intriguing
resonances created by the other arresting images of deprived people, who
find the celebratory ending of the opera totally irrelevant to their
lives. It is a complete and thoroughly exceptional achievement.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0121 236 5622. |
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