ARTS Pith without substance

JOHN HIGGINS

A year ago Walter Felsenstein's production of The Love for Three Oranges opened in

East Berlin's Komische Oper. It had been a long time coming and any number of reasons had been given for successive postponements: the scenery was not right, the stage managers still had problems to solve, the second conductor wanted more rehearsal, Felsenstein was ill. Felsenstein was not satisfied ... But just as the Prince in Act HI cuts open the last orange to reveal the most beautiful of princesses, so Felsenstein eventually unveiled what must surely be the definitive staging of the opera.

The whole world of Oranges—magical, didactic, comic, surrealistic —glittered before us. The opera which so often seems sprawl- ing to the point of incoherence—Lord Harewood takes five pages of Kobbe for the plot and he needs every last sentence—was moulded into a bewitching fairytale, dazzling eye and ear. The court of the King of Clubs, where much of the action takes place, was suspended midway between heaven and a murky hell from which the lesser devils, such as Farfarello and Smeraldina. emerged. On either side were ranked the opposed factions of the stage audience, baying for comedy or tragedy, lyric drama or low farce with the ferocity of supporters at a cup tie.

Balm was dispensed by the scenc-shif- ter/stewards, pacifying the disputatious spec- tators, begging them to cover over their pre- judices for an hour and allow the action to run. And how it ran! Felsenstein pulled in the whole paraphernalia of pantomime to lead the Prince from his bed of sick boredom to the arms of his princess. Invisible wires, green thunderclaps of smoke, sudden blackouts, passing clouds, improbably placed trap doors . . . all were summoned to the rescue. And there, thrown in almost inci- dentally, was the most disarming of Christ- mas vacation lectures on stage mechanics-- the how it moves and why it works of the theatre.

Unfair, it will be said, to compare a pro- duction on which neither pence nor days were spared with a modest repertory revival at the Coliseum. A just criticism. But great productions. like great performances, have a nasty habit of sticking in the memory and harshening the judgment. There were few moments during the two hours span of the

Oranges revival last week without irritating recollections of things better arranged elsewhere.

The change of theatre, as all too often at the Coliseum. has brought problems with it.

Peter Coes Oranges, originally mounted for

the New Opera Company in 1963. looked quite well at Sadler's Wells. The production leant heavily on the ideas of the Kabuki and No theatres, which were theatrically fashionable at the time and, far more im- portant, had influenced Meyerhold while he

was adapting Carlo Gozzi's fiaba tea:rale into Russian with Solovyov and Vogak in

1914. (The finished version was bsed in a short-lived literary magazine of the same name edited by the three friends and was designed, as was Gozzi's original play, as an attack on the artistic follies of the age; four years later it provided the starting point for Prokofiev's opera).

But the piece of cloth waved at the corners to represent a river and the old red benches piled on top of one another to stand in for a mountain look pathetically lost in the Col- iseum, traditional home of the big theatrical effect. The vital stage audience is dispersed clumsily in the boxes and even at the ends of the circle front row. Dressed in ordinary Saturday afternoon shopping clothes they are unidentified and unidentifiable; their interruptions at this distance sound half hearted and the children in the theatre, and many of the adults, could well be forgiven for wondering what the hell they are com- plaining about.

But the real loss is of surprise and spec- tacle. It is all very well to have the running gag of the Magician whose tricks all go wrong—Eric Shilling was understandably subdued in this part—but it is advisable to balance it off with some expertise elsewhere : the curtain which spent a sticky five minutes at the end getting entangled with the scenery looked all too magicianly. The visual gags were crude and would certainly not pass muster at the Palladium or at Golders Green. In a word the production has become earthbound : the Prince, cursed by Fata Morgana to love three oranges, should be blown high across the stage at the end of Act It with his companion Truffaldino—instead they simply walk off into the wings; the Prin- cess Ninetta. far from being turned into an evil rat, trips across the stage as a delectable white mouse who would go down well with the boys at any fancy dress party.

The musical jokes come across much bet- ter, thanks to the conducting of David Lloyd-Jones—who shows in the pit all the grip of the spirit of the work which is miss- ing on stage—and to one or two individual performances. The Herald (Ian Comboy) who comes on with a trumpet to be doubled in the pit by a farting bass trombone, the fat female Cook who sings with the basso pro- fondo of Gwynne Howell, the mock Puccini love duet from Gregory Dempsey and Margaret Eales: these are the pleasures of an evening which spends too much time trying to prove that Prokofiev's brilliant Oranges are all pith and no substance.

A few hundred yards further east, Covent

Garden is offering a bargain basement (2 lOs a stall) Don Giovanni, which would have the makings of a good buy had a more inspired, and inspiring, conductor been engaged. Jerzy Semkow, who was making his

debut at the Opera House, seemed content to hold the ensemble together and aim at nothing higher—an odd approach since the cast was drawn entirely from past and present members of the regular company who must be well aware of one another's strengths and weaknesses. There was no drama in the pit, the recitatives were flabby, the graveyard scene and the descent to hell were as demoniacal as a Sunday School treat.

Forbes Robinson, the first British Don at the Garden since Santley, seemed more con- cerned about old age than possible dam- nation. Here was the greying stagedoor Johnny, hopefully sniffing around for a few last affairs before the flesh finally has to make do with fantasy. It is a legitimate interpretation—what approach is not with this character?—and there were signs that it had been worked over thoroughly with John C,opley, who has done some neat tailoring to Zeffirelli's original production. `La ci darem' went particularly well, with Don Giovanni standing far away from Zerlina to begin with, hopeful but very hesitant, and then moving in fast at the first encouraging sign. The vocal line lies well for him here, and there was a mellowness in the voice that went well with the characterisation. 'Fin- ch'han dal vino' was another matter:no dash, no poise. At moments like that the casting seemed disputable.

The two most successful debutants were Anne Howells and Ryland Davies. Miss Howells seems to be inheriting all Covent Garden's most unsuitable costumes at the moment: she cut a mad-Margaretish figure in a blonde wig and a roses-and-cream dress which might have been used to cover up a particularly sickly box of bonbons. But there was no hiding the ideas of this Zerlina, quick to learn the arts of love and the ways of decaying nobles. She responded perfectly in `La ci damn' and phrased Wedrai carino' lusciously. There was more fine phrasing from Ryland Davies, a less dynamic Ottavio than Stuart Burrows last year but an equally elegant one; the main doubts about Mr Davies concern the weight of the voice—he was notably happier with his curtain arias than singing further back stage. Joan Carlyle's first Anna was a disappointment, over-acted and sung with blurry tone. Geraint Evans, perhaps generously unwilling to overshadow his colleagues, toned down his Leporello considerably.