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Conducted
by Martin Andre
Directed by Christopher Alden
Designed
by Johan Engels
Worker
Richard Coxon
Grandmother
Susan Gorton
Salud
Mary Plazas
Paco
Leonardo Capalbo
Uncle Sarvaor
Graeme Broadbent
Carmela
Kim-Marie
Woodhouse
Flamenco Singer
Adrian Clarke
Chorus of Opera North
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Sadler's
Wells
Opera North: Eight Little Greats
22 - 26
June 2004 |
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There is exquisite music in this essay on seduction, faithlessness and the suicidal insanity of love. The story is slight and unoriginal ‚ a man (Paco) seduces a lower class girl (Salud), promising her eternal fidelity, and the very next day marries a rich girl, whereupon the broken-hearted Salud kills herself at his wedding. But the point of Falla's operatic essay is the exploration he gives through the music of Salud's feelings ‚ her hope and her despair ‚ and the life of toil and closed horizons out of which her hope blossoms as a result of the seducer's promises.
The weight of the piece falls on Mary Plazas' very capable shoulders. Singing throughout with sustained grace and deep emotion, she is reminiscent of the lark: so much music pouring from so slender and vulnerable a frame that it becomes a wonder.
It is clear that special problems are set for stage directors of this opera by the long and beautifully wrought passages of music during which no-one sings. The structure of the music is indeed remarkably untheatrical, and even the dumb-show required for the story at those points could never, without unusual imaginings about how to fill the time with action, be enough. This is doubtless why director Christopher Alden and designer Johan Engels have made the choices they did. Engels gives us a clothing sweat-shop ‚ exceedingly well-made and convincing, it is an eye-opener of a set ‚ but it is not the right place for this story, which needs a cottage first and then a church or church steps; and the misplacing of the action is the first step in setting the production at odds with Falla.
The second misstep is provided by Alden, who choreographs a sequence of actions which, for the most part, scarcely relate ‚ and sometimes seem at odds with ‚ the story being told by the words and music. Thinking hard about what he is trying to say by so doing, one can discern a clever intention at work: the intention of introducing of levels of complexity that fill out the story, and enrich it with counterpoints. A good idea: but it does not come off. For example: the worker who sings the refrain about the cursed life of man ‚ 'man is as the anvil to the hammer' ‚ is put into drag as an unpopular member of the sewing team, and at the end, when Salud picks up his/her refrain and says that woman is the anvil to fate, he/she hastens to embrace her, revealing the concealed and disappointed love (now construed as lesbian) beneath.
Again, after Salud refuses Paco's sexual advances, undressing her on stage and clawing at her as she tries to pull away, he masturbates to relieve his frustration, and then contemptuously lights a cigarette and walks away, this piece of by-play being intended to show that his protestations are insincere and he wishes only to use Salud. The music and the words, as those near the end show, are at odds with this interpretation. Paco says little when Salud kills herself, true; but what he sings then, and the space around the terrible event, might be expected to be filled with something different from the cocaine-and-marijuana-dazed indifference of the rich kids as they sprawl nearby.
So alas, this imaginative effort to make more of Falla than the story really permits results only in eccentricity and puzzlement. One gives up the effort to decode the eccentric aspects of the production, and enjoys what is straightforward: Salud's suffering and yearning; the depiction, entirely consistent with the music, of Paco as the archetypal male bastard; and the self-indulgent anarchy of the rich kids at the wedding, contrasted with the toiling life of the factory workers in their poverty and hopelessness ‚ a contrast needed, as just suggested, until the moment of Salud's suicide, when the music tells us that Paco must understand at last what deep truths lie in deep love: for he says then, turning (in a staging truer to the text) from the dead Salud to look with horror at the girl he has married, that he has made a mistake, and has been a fool.
AC Grayling |
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