Sunday 6 December 2009

How Not To Handle Handel







 I was excited when an old friend got three tickets to English National Opera’s The Messiah at the Coliseum on Friday.  Then I saw a review in The Guardian and a nice big picture of the chorus in an assortment of high-street clothing hugging each other during the Hallelujah Chorus.  I searched around for a blindfold to put in my handbag.  D. had not entirely clocked the fact that this was über-cool Deborah Warner’s production, the first  major attempt to stage Handel’s majestic oratorio.








I sensed her excitement mount with the plaintiff notes of the orchestra tuning up. Those notes resolved themselves into a glorious baroque sound and a gauzy curtain lifted on a sea of light. Curiously, this resolved itself into London traffic  at night  projected on the black marble floor.  Then a beautiful grid of suspended golden lilies slowly rose and a scene was assembled:  a hotel bed in one sector, a line of chairs at the back (the dole queue?) and some benches Stage Right which I interpreted as church pews. Oh, and a computer console beyond but I didn’t have much of a theory for that.  What a ghastly mess.  On strolled the chorus, like a crowd of weekend travellers at Paddington Station.   Catherine Wynn-Jones, the sublime mezzo soprano dressed as a Building Society clerk sat on the bed, why?  Now a little kid ( the future of mankind? search me) runs around, jumping over benches and playing on the computer.  Then a maid comes on and strips the bed, extravagantly folding sheets and duvet. (Off you go - now! - back into the wings. Some of us want to concentrate on the chorus.)








There was some choreography too. I actually loved the girl in the blue hoodie expressing her joy at The Annunciation. (The one with her jeans tucked into a pair of tan leather boots and the grey cardi was the angel.) Then again, the idea of the crucifixion was given power by some brutal contact improvisation amongst the symbolic golden props. A tricky one, that. (Our friend Andrew noted that Deborah Warner always has a ladder in it somewhere.)


I don’t mind experimental theatre but this was a fatuous conceit, attempting to make it the ‘outreach’ Messiah  using lame 21st century metaphor.   By the second interval and an infantile nativity scene (mothers snapping their darlings on camera phones awwww) the seats were mysteriously emptying.







  The woman next to me was thinking of getting back to Leicester early but I suggested it would be a shame to miss ‘I know that My Redeemer Liveth’, one of Handel’s most poignant arias. Imagine how I couldn’t look at her when it was delivered from a hospital bed with the soprano getting a blanket bath into the bargain.  I have never laughed in the Messiah before.  Then the nurses pulled the sheet up over her head and I felt a bit bad.  But, really, I could have wept for the whole cast.

D.  may have been embarrassed at first but we retrieved George Fredrich Handel from this tragic contextualisation, thanks to the astounding orchestra and the electric singing.  Then we tried to ponder the notion of the Sacred and the Profane.. A bucket of champagne did help it all go down.

Images: George Fredrich Handel by Mercier ca 1720 here;  The E N O  Messiah  photo: Tristram Kenton The Guardian;  Fra Angelico: The Annunciation 1438-45; Piero della Francesca Nativity c 1470






16 comments:

  1. Denim clad tubs group hugging whilst singing the Hallelujah Chorus - how edifying that must have been!

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  2. "'Outreach' Messiah. Very "ouch"

    Despite what reads like a curate's egg of an evening, it seems to me that the good more or less outweighed the bad. If not all your memories will be painful than I think I can take this review as a recommendation to see it blindfolded

    B

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  3. Blue, there was one man in a suit and I nearly applauded.

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  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. Thanks Barima. It was an experience I shan't forget. Certain images and
    the music happily remain.

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  6. It's obviously hard to come up with a replacement for the Music-why tamper with what some think Can
    be Changed-The mind boggles. Here is a rather successful ballet version-of- right here in l'il NC.
    G

    http://www.carolinaballet.com/messiah.html

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  7. oh- and I love that picture of Handel-somewhere he must have known something like this was bound to happen in the future- what did they do for a headache then? G

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  8. My memory of the messiah will always be clouded by my college roomie who would go around singing, "Oh, we love sheep" with a bestial gleam in her eye. Hope you have recovered!

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  9. Home, d'you know, I had a friend who loved that same line! Sorry to be a pedant but it's 'We, like sheep.."

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  10. It has been my christmas tradition the past 7 years to go to the Kennedy center to hear the messiah performed TRADITIONALLY and wonderfully. I suppose you could have just closed your eyes and enjoyed the amazing music!

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  11. Sounds hideous. Well, probably sounded great, given the work, but looked hideous. Why tamper with what is good? The whole point of it is the beauty and majesty of the music. I think I would be been utterly distraught if I'd had to endure that.

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  12. Sort of reminds me of one of those stagings of Shakespeare in contemporary costume...Julius Caesar as an American football game with helmets and Gatorade, or The Tempest in the community room of of a mental hospital.
    I still wonder if people think "If Diaghilev and Stravinsky could pull this shit off, so can we." And no one tells them otherwise until it's too late. There almost has to be some sort of hermetic principle driving these productions that requires a strict regime of silence and isolation. Otherwise they couldn't happen, could they?

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  13. Dear Rosie, you missed the joke! The bestial gleam was a reference to the stories of shepherds having um, affairs with their sheep! She was a very bad influence on me!

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  14. Home, I'm sorry! I very well did get the joke That'll teach me for being pedagogic, trying to explain to the uninitiated how the play on words
    comes about. It makes me want to tell you my 'Lazy Dave' (which actually involved a cow) joke but probably not suitable for the public forum.

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  15. Oh rurritable, you made me spill my coffee! What a marvellous assessment of experimental theatre.

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