Entranced by Janacek
Michael Tanner
The Cunning Little Vixen Royal College of Music Candide English National Opera
Janacek’s wonderfully unsentimental and warm-hearted opera about animals and human beings and the relations between them turned out to be an inspired choice for the students of the Royal College of Music to stage at the Britten Theatre. Any selfproclaimed opera lover who doesn’t keep a close eye on what the colleges are doing is a fool, a snob or a liar, probably all three. It is often in the intimate settings of their theatres that one has the most enjoyable experiences, partly thanks to the proximity to the performers, partly because since none of them has to strain to produce enough noise they sound as if singing is their natural mode of communication.
With Janacek, who was obsessed with speech patterns, their rhythms and pitches, singing as an intensification, no more, of what we do all the time is almost always most satisfying in small theatres. I only wish that enunciation were a more emphasised item in the training of these singers. As always, the lower voices weren’t hard to understand, but though the Vixen herself, Sadhbh Dennedy, was enchanting to look at, to watch, to hear, I only understood her intermittently, so that the reason for the shape of her vocal lines was rarely apparent — Norman Tucker’s admirable English translation is at pains to stick closely to the original. In the Vixen’s scene with the Rooster and Hens, which was brilliantly staged, it’s vital that her feminist harangue to the Hens be heard, since it sets the scene for her massacre of them and her escape. The way the Hens moved, and the astoundingly chicken-like noises they made, reflect the greatest credit on Jo Davies, the director. Angelica Voje was a natty, insouciant Fox who made something genuinely erotic out of their courting, with its very rapid and numerous results, some of the most delightful small children I have ever seen on stage, self-possessed to an unimaginable extent.
The costumes were all entrancing, and helped to establish the atmosphere which the drab staging certainly did not, with a few pieces of household furniture suspended high above the action most of the time, and nothing else. There was the irritant of a graceless dancer superfluously hanging around, but nothing else annoyed. The humans were all sharply drawn studies, too, with the Forester of James Oldfield so wise, testy, relaxed and vigilant that one forgot that this was theatre. Even so, the single most striking achievement was the warm but jagged accompaniment of the excellent orchestra under Michael Rosewell. How often does one emerge from one of the prestigious opera houses with so rich a feeling of satisfaction?
Not, alas, from the Coliseum and the glitzy production of Bernstein’s Candide. Actually, the flashiness of the show was its strongest feature, and the contrast between this slickness and the slack tackiness of Kismet last year, nadir of ENO’s trawling of the musical depths, couldn’t be greater. This show is shared with the Châtelet and the Scala, Milan, and staged by Robert Carsen. Staged as a giant TV show, the overture is immensely enjoyable, not the high-kicking music, but the Fifties footage of the Kennedys, Marilyn, and the rest of what we thought of as the ambience of life in the United States then. Less to my taste — but I’m in a minority — is the arch narration of Alex Jennings, dressed as Voltaire and elocuting in that way that drollness in musicals seems to dictate. He also plays Pangloss and Martin, much better. Yet the tiresome manner indicates something about the whole show, not only this production of it but Bernstein’s own conception, perhaps showing why he could never settle on a version of it that satisfied him. A satirist needs a hard heart, or the successful pretence that that is what he has, and a rigorous abstention from serious moralising within his satire. Voltaire in this version lapses into earnestness, fails to maintain the chilly detachment that he affects. Just so with the show, which tries to be cold, but melts embarrassingly into the schmaltz of ‘It must be so’ and ‘Make our gardens grow’.
The cast is capable, though amplification doesn’t do their voices any favours. The title role suits Toby Spence well, something that might give him mild cause for concern. Going late in the run, I saw Marnie Breckenridge (pity the spelling is slightly different from that of her great nearnamesake) as Cunegonde. She is a capable actress, but squalls, and ‘Glitter and be gay’ was almost painful. The inadequacies of what is in many ways a smart and stylish production could be easily overlooked if Carsen hadn’t indulged himself in such an acreage of dialogue, much of it neither amusing nor relevant to the progress of the narrative. He seems to have thought that a scattershot approach would be best, but the result is that this just feels like a not-witty-enough anti-American diatribe into which music occasionally and incongruously intrudes.
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