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Director
Bill Bankes-Jones
Music Director
Stuart Stratford
Conductor
Stuart Stratford
Design
Tim Meacock
Lighting
Mark Doubleday
Choreographer
Quinny Sacks
Cast
Rosa
Adey Grummet
Mr. Fitzroy
Omar Ebrahim
Figaro
Aris Nadirin
Burgess
Robert Burt
Flora
Sarah Jillian Cox
Leo
Darren Abrahams
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Bridewell
Theatre
6 - 22 February
2004 |
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'It is the animal
cry of passion that should dictate the
melodic line!' shouts Rameau's nephew
in Diderot's irreverent dialogue, 'And
don't imagine that the technique of
stage actors and their declamation can
serve as a model... we want something
more energetic, less stilted, truer
to life'.
Based
on La
Mere Coupable,
the final play in Beaumarchais' Figaro
trilogy, with the libretto written by
Olivier award-winning Amanda Holden,
the music commissioned from six young
composers, and the performances physically
and emotionally charged, Tete a Tete's
new opera in its best moments makes
sense of this extravagantly passionate
ideal - and at its worst falls completely
short. Beaumarchais' preceding two plays
served as sources for Rossini's Barber
of Seville
and for Mozart's
Marriage of Figaro,
and his third play is similarly shot
through with love, death, jealousy,
betrayal, and (possibly elusive) redemption.
Such grand themes inevitably set the
stakes high, exerting a pressure on
the composers and performers to convey
something adequate to the weight, as
well as humour, of their subject matter.
This production delivers on some counts,
but not all.
Transposed
to the early 1990s, and set in a London
townhouse on the day that the Fitzroy
family move in, the plot of Family
Matters
unravels intricately but fluidly through
a series of confrontations and revelations
engineered by Mr. Fitzroy's eccentric
and dubious 'business advisor' Burgess.
Uneven, awkward, and dislocated, the
first few scenes set up a general state
of unrest in a family riddled with unresolved,
unvoiced, memories. Then through Burgess'
hilariously obsequious and self-assured
antics (how could he imagine his duplicities
would not come to light!), a complexity
of hidden relationships is exposed,
and the scene looks set for disaster.
Finally, in the wake of the malevolently
initiated upheaval, the family is inadvertently
brought closer together. They ultimately
come to see each other for who they
are, and are able to laugh.
Ostensibly,
the issue at stake in this opera concerns
the naming of the relationships, familial
or otherwise, between Mr. and Mrs. Fitzroy,
the young Leo and Flora, and others
we only hear about Ç including a son
and brother who was killed some years
before in a car crash. The characters
look through old slides, seek out hidden
letters, and privately speculate about
adultery, suicide, and incest. But the
deeper issue, which they gradually come
to recognize, clearly concerns the actual
intrinsic relations they create with
each other in their ongoing interactions.
The characters get closer with the unfolding
of each scene.
In step
with this dramatic progression, the
musical dissonance and clutter of the
early scenes gives way to a more melodic,
even soulful, second half. When Mr.
Fitzroy and his wife Rosa finally speak
openly to each other, simple choral
harmonies provide a suddenly gentle
backdrop. Earlier brash tones are replaced
by cello and glockenspiel. Helen Chadwick's
easy humour and James Olsen's spare
understatement set the mood. The wooden
boxes that initially confined and obstructed
the stage are opened up to reveal sofas
and lights, the makings or beginnings
of a new home.
In these
ways the production gains assurance,
and the final scenes are by far the
best. They are also the funniest, with
the loyal PA Figaro increasingly taking
over from Burgess in his subtle manipulation
of the Fitzroys' fates. Inexplicably
armed with a vacuum cleaner, his face
powdered white and his cheeks rouged,
Aris Nadiran succeeds in playing this
most ambiguous character with a light
touch. The background role of the musical
conductor is also Ç bizarrely - implicated
in the unfolding of the plot. And all
of this precipitates a wonderfully farcical
sense of the Fitzroys as orchestrated
by forces beyond their control.
The opera
does however intermittently fail to
gel. This is partly explained by the
presence of six composers, whose pieces
inevitably vie for attention in ways
that are not always adventitious. But
more generally, it is characteristic
of Tete a Tete's production to combine
a peculiarly heavy handed symbolism
with an almost craft-y sensibility,
and this dangerous combination veers
between being occasionally unfortunate
to at other times providing pure comedy.
In a project that emphasizes the process
of experiment and collaboration, the
task of avoiding the former and achieving
the latter turns out to be especially
dependent upon the conviction of the
performers. One is struck by a marked
difference between those who merely
seem to illustrate or ornament the plot,
and others who play a much more constitutive
role in its expression. The most telling
example of this is in the exceptionally
natural and whole-hearted presences
of Robert Burt as Burgess, and of Sarah
Jillian Cox as Flora, whose assurance
succeeds in bringing the work to life.
Family
Matters
is a young and still developing opera
that promises to evolve over the course
of its UK tour into more than the sum
of its parts. In this more than anything
else the confidence and enthusiasm of
the cast looks set to play a crucial
role.
Naomi Goulder |
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