Opera
The Metropolitan Mikado (Queen Elizabeth Hall)
Jolly poor show
Rodney Milnes
When Oliver Knussen's second Sendak-based opera was premiered incom- plete on last autumn's Glyndebourne Tour, with the missing sections narrated by Bamber Gascoigne, I wrote testily about precedents and Lady Bracknell. Although no one was saying anything before the second premiere at Glyndebourne itself last week — lips were not only tight but in some cases dead white — it took no more than a reading of the programme synopsis to reveal that it was still not quite finished. Lady Bracknell would be speechless. As the missing bits included what one must presume to be the musical climax (the last' orchestral interlude encompassing a Sealyham terrier's Himmelfahrt) and as Mr Knussen's first Sendak opera, Where the Wild Things Are, was premiered in Brus- sels in 1980 without the climactic Wild Rumpus, one begins to suspect that Mr Knussen might have,difficulties in finishing things.
As someone who has the greatest possi- ble difficulty in starting things, a fact well known to innumerable prematurely grey arts editors and radio producers, I have a certain sympathy. But I have even more sympathy for the management and the artists concerned. It was rumoured after last autumn's fiasco that the composer had been given a new deadline of 1 January, by which time if the score was not complete then the festival performances would be cancelled. He is plainly a man of boundless charm, and one held in great affection by the musical and critical establishment witness the generally good-natured notices last week of the 'dear old 011ie's done it again' variety and the fact that the threatened deadline came and went. Dark tales of singers still waiting for their notes the week before the second premiere were perhaps true, and the sound of rehearsals proceeding even as the audience was assembling, followed by a technically very uneasy performance, suggested that the parts of the opera that were complete were only very recently so. As one of the few people in the trade who don't know Mr Knussen, I can say 'nuts to dear old 011ie': management, singers, stage staff and assorted colleagues have been put under intolerable strain and left with egg on their faces, and audiences have twice paid money in good faith and been short- changed. I think the whole thing is a jolly poor show, and Lady Bracknell might be so unkind as to mutter about a certain lack of professionalism. Being something of an agnostic when it comes to other people's dogs, I am anyway not convinced that Maurice Sendak's heartfelt tribute to his late pet is necessari- ly the stuff of which opera is made. If Jennie the Sealyham's adventures on the road from life through death to immortal- ity had deeply significant things to say about the human condition, then they passed me by in a production by Frank Corsaro that lays wistful charm on a little too thick. There is some very beautiful music, most skilfully orchestrated (marvel- lous playing by the London Sinfonietta), `I'm sure we've met — your familiar's familiar.' and one shouldn't get too worked up about having heard a lot of it before: most successful opera composers have leant heavily on their predecessors, while the few true originals like Weber, Berlioz and Chabrier have been rewarded with decades of neglect for their pains. Mr Knussen's comprehensive tribute to Britten, Stravins- ky and Ravel is as heartfelt as Mr Sendak's to his Sealyham, and the public may be forgiven if it chooses not to participate in this private love-in.
The singers involved deserve nothing but admiration: Cynthia Buchan projecting character as well as voice through an all-over costume, with Deborah Rees, Rosemary Hardy, Neil Jenkins, Andrew Gallacher and Stephen Richardson loyal in support. And I also felt for the stage crew manipulating a squeaky set to which, with all that rehearsal still going on, no one had had time to apply a little oil, and for some of whose manipulations the music was missing. As Jennie might say, `Grrrrre.
There was a puzzling sense of déjà vu hovering over The Metropolitan Mikado, Ned Sherrin's and Alistair Beaton's latest contribution to the Ken Livingstone perso- nality cult, that clicked somewhere in the second half. Some of the targets for this nasty satire — far more wounding than last year's amiable Ratepayers' lolanthe — are obvious hard-left bogies: the venal `Meeja' in the persons of Robin Day and Alastair Burnet; the police, represented by a jack- booted, goose-stepping Kenneth Newman; defence, a swivel-eyed Michael Heseltine who ends up in obscene sado-masochistic congress with Sir Kenneth; the Prime Minister, portrayed as a foul-mouthed, nymphomaniacal harridan. One target was less obvious to someone politically naive: the most poisonous bile was'reserved for Neil Kinnock, turncoat and windbag. All good clean fun, then, greeted with squeals of delight by an impeccably middle-class audience. Of course, we were back in Paris in the 1860s, when a whole society danced gleefully round its own grave to the bac- chanalian music of Offenbach.
Now Offenbach was no more a Prussian agent that Mr Sherrin is a colonel in the KGB: they are court jesters to whom the jest is all and the court, whoever it may be, nothing. Mr Livingstone himself was there to acknowledge the audience's adulation, and there were no tasteless jokes about rats, sinking ships and Brent; this end-of- term romp effaced memories of a rather decisive end of term in 1870. Much of the new script is sharply funny, a little of it pointlessly insulting. Jokes about the Japanese indicate that racism is a movable feast. The direction is crisp, the music tolerably well served, many of the per- formances brilliant, especially Martin Con- nor's Kinnock, Simon Butteriss's Newman, Robert Meadmore's Heseltine and Rose- mary Ashe's Barbara-Windsor-style Yum- Yum. I laughed a lot and shuddered only occasionally; audiences in Paris just laughed when Bismarck dropped in to see The Grand Duchess in 1867. Heigh-ho.
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