Phonetics & Photographs

Show:             Coraline

Type:              Opera 

Venue:            The Barbican

Date:               Wednesday 4^thApril 2018

Seen with:     Tout Seule

Ticket:           £57

View:              Middle of the stalls, so pretty darn good!

Cast:             The Royal Opera; the woman playing the Mother/Other Mother had lost her voice so she walked the role and it was sung by another lady off to the side of the stage. I think they said something about her learning the music in an afternoon or a day or something like that. In any case, it was very impressive.

Verdict:         Coraline was one of the shows that I was so excited for that I didn’t really do any research, I just bought a ticket. It booked out pretty quickly, so I ended up paying more than I usually would for the ticket, but did end up with a pretty great seat.

I struggled with the show at first, but that’s completely on me. See, for some reason, I went in expecting the same or similar music to the Coralinefilm, which is composed by the wonderful Bruno Coulais. He composed some of my favourite soundtracks, not justCoraline, but Les Choristes, The Secret of Kells, and Song of the Sea. His music is full of children’s choirs, made up languages,  building harmonies, and it’s melodic. Above all, it’s melodic. It may contain strange and unsettling melodies at times, but it’s melodic.

The Royal Opera’s Coralinewas not melodic. Thanks to one of my past students (Hi Glenn!) who insisted on doing his exam program on music one year, I know enough to say that the music was dissonant.  Which is to say, sounds that don’t seem to fit together and kind of sound wrong together. Sounds that you want to move or change so that they do sound right together. At least, that’s my understanding. If anyone would like to offer up a more clear explanation, please feel free!

Anyway, the music was dissonant, the whole way through. Which was fine, and I certainly see why – Coralineis a dissonant kind of story. It did just take me till part way into the first act to get my head around it. Once I did, I could see exactly how and why decisions about the composition had been made. And I enjoyed it, I did! The set was great, swinging from one side to the other to let Coraline through the doors. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible were very funny, played to the hilt by their actors even though one of them was suffering from a cold at the time. The Other Mother’s hand was properly terrifying when it got severed and came out to chase Coraline around the room. The mirror world in which the other children were trapped was appropriately spooky, and the stage effects showed a professionalism and restraint that comes from an experienced production team, which is always nice to see.

And yet… I don’t know, I just felt that there was more that could’ve been done. If the music had switched from dissonant to melodic when Coraline entered the Other Mother’s world it would’ve been an appropriately eerie touch. Obviously Coraline couldn’t have been played by a younger singer, the role was too challenging for that, but the result was someone playing a child who didn’t appear to have ever interacted with a child in real life. Every stereotypical pout and stomped foot pulled just a little at that feeling of reality that a really good show maintains effortlessly.

Overall, a very interestingproduction, and I do use that in all senses of the word. I know a lot of people took their children to see Coraline, and there were certainly a lot of children on the night that I went. I don’t know that I would’ve enjoyed it when I was a child – I don’t think I would’ve understand what they were trying to do with the music. And seeing as the Other Mother’s hand properly freaked me out at 28, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t see it as a child after all…

Show:                 Iolanthe (by Arthur Gilbert and W. S. Sullivan)

Type:                  Opera

Venue:                London Coliseum

Date:                   Saturday 7^thApril 2018

Seen with:         Tout seule

Ticket:                 £20

View:                Few rows back on the balcony, so not too bad really, but slightly impaired by very active children in the family sitting in the row in front

Cast:                 English National Opera: Samantha Price (Iolanthe), Ellie Laugharne (Phyllis), Yvonne Howard (Fairy Queen), Marcus Farnsworth (Strephon), Andrew Shore (Lord Chancellor)

Verdict:           If The Birthday Party is a primer for Theatre of the Absurd, Iolanthe is a primer for opera. The official jury is probably out on whether Gilbert and Sullivan’s works are ‘comic operas’ (as they referred to them) or ‘operettas’ (the European form of light opera that G&S disliked for being too risqué). However, in comparison to G&S shows such as Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, Iolanthe plays more as a straight opera. Comic, yes, but on a grand (operatic?) scale that Pirates and Mikado don’t really set out to be. Musically, this is some of G&S’s best work, being composed somewhere in the middle of their time together. Which can turn out to be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s a great way to dip your toe into more opera-like music and familiarise yourself before you head off to see something like La Traviata (English National Opera’s other production running concurrently). But if you’ve come to a G&S production expecting just fluff and frivolity, you may actually end up leaving disappointed.
All of G&S’s works are satirical, but in Iolanthe they really go after the British parliament, the House of Lords in particular. Essentially, the peers are bumbling idiots all in love with one young beautiful woman (of course) who is a Ward in Chancery (??? – appears to mean a ward of the state but under the guardianship of the Lord Chancellor particularly?) and therefore can’t marry the man she loves (a simple shepherd) without their permission. Which they don’t give.
Oh, and the shepherd’s mother is a fairy. Who was banished from the fairy kingdom for loving a mortal.
Oh, and when the beautiful girl sees the shepherd hugging his mother (who still looks young herself because she is, of course, a fairy), she assumes he’s cheating on her, so she promises to marry one of the Lords instead.
Oh, and the Lord Chancellor turns out to be the mortal that the fairy mother fell in love with, and therefore the shepherd’s father.
Oh, and at the end all the peers and fairies fall in love and suddenly grow wings and fly away to fairyland.
Just a regular night at the theatre.

The fairies were fantastically costumed, somewhere between grown-up versions of the Gumnut Babies or Shirley Barber’s Fairies and what you get when a dress-up box explodes. And they moved around the stage like Disney World princesses on crack. Staging and blocking in a G&S production is the first thing to remind you that what you’re watching is a parody. It comes out in the lyrics too, of course, and the music, if you’re familiar enough with the source material to catch the joke, but G&S knew their audiences, and they knew people need to see funny before they hear funny.

The sight gags started with a flamingo coyly peeking its head around the proscenium arch as the first thing on stage, before being abruptly pulled off, and continued on from there in pretty much the same vein. During the very sweet lovers’ duet in act one, a pair of black-morph-suited stagehands placed prop sheep around the stage and then removed them, all while feeling their way sightlessly around and bumping into each other. When the peers appeared (a-peered?), they did so in a steam engine, complete with steam, which broke through the backdrop and left it lying on the stage in tatters. One of them was recognisably dressed as Boris Johnson, down to the bumbling walk and blond mop wig. He even returned to the stage on a Boris-bike at one stage. I’m sure there were a few more gags that I missed, not being a native Brit. Probably like everyone watching Thor: Ragnarok who wasn’t an Aussie or Kiwi. But a special mention has to go to the young man playing the Lord Chancellor’s page – during one memorable song in the second act he threw his body around the stage (or was thrown) with such abandon that it was both hilarious and mildly horrifying.

The orchestra received the loudest applause of the evening, and for good reason – the music was flawless. The acoustics in the Coliseum are fantastic, and sitting through the overture in darkness was an experience in and of itself.

Speaking of music, G&S parodied both Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Wagner’s Ring cycle for the fairies and the Fairy Queen respectively. Not being a fan of Wagner, I didn’t pick up on the second, but I had distinct little moments of confusion throughout the show that I’ve since realised were related to the Mendelssohn connections. I’ve loved the music from Ein Sommernachtstraum since performing snippets of it (in English) with my choir as a teenager. During Iolanthe, I kept hearing little things that made me expect someone to launch into ‘Bunte Schlangen, zweigezüngt!’ (or, as we the chorus sang, ‘Philomele with melody, sing in our sweet lullaby!’).

Although most were strong vocally, some of the cast struggled with diction at times, which was a shame. It did mean that you had to rely on the surtitles at times, even though the performance was in English. But as that was really the only (small) complaint to be made, it was overall a very enjoyable performance!

Notes:               Iolanthe was the first new theatre in the world to be lit by electric lighting instead of gas.