Dove’s tale
Michael Tanner
The Adventures of Pinocchio Grand Theatre, Leeds
It’s odd how, even if you try to ignore Christmas, it still manages to determine the shape of your end-of-year experiences. Three weeks ago, four days before Christmas Day, Opera North enterprisingly mounted the world première of Jonathan Dove’s 21st opera, Pinocchio. I haven’t seen any opera since, except on TV and DVD, yet my memories of it are alarmingly faint. I have a pretty clear impression of what much of it looked like, but very little of what it sounded like. I’m not being snide at Dove’s expense, just wondering how far what seems like the interminable sequence of fragmented days is responsible for my failure of recall. The sheer fluency of Dove’s output, which I think wouldn’t be hard to guess even if one hadn’t been told about his productivity, does invite comparisons
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with the churners-out of opera, whether the recycling baroque composers, or the 19th-century Italians who produced at least one new opera each season, and usually in a matter of weeks.
This opera of Dove’s, to judge from the newspaper articles and the programme booklet, is, on the contrary, the product of creative need. Just as Pinocchio cries out repeatedly to his creator Geppetto, ‘Make me!’, so Pinocchio has been entreating Dove. The idea of freeing a creature from its raw material, and then putting it through a series of adventures until it is transformed into another kind of creature, in this case a living boy, not a wooden one, has multiple attractions, and the librettist Alasdair Middleton has explored and exploited them cleverly. The mischievous, happy-go-lucky wooden puppet with the elongating nose becomes something like ‘a good boy’, to the partial regret of Dove and Middleton. They seem, that is, to take it that their version of the story, which is clearly closer to Collodi’s original tale than to the coarsely sentimental Disney version which is all most of us know, is ambivalent: the wooden boy was naughty, but what fun he is compared with his incarnation. This makes the tale a variant of the-price-that-we-pay-in-becoming-civilised attitude, one that we have all to consider, but not, for me, illuminated in this case, since we don’t see anything much of Pinocchio once he has become a real boy. He is released, but while that may make him ordinary, it might at least protect him from the kinds of dangerous adventure which he has entertained us by having, but which are less fun, one imagines, from his point of view.
Dove professes not to know what a children’s opera would be, but surely he has at least two masterpieces to help him form the concept. Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel is the obvious first: gloriously and unforgettably melodious and musically cogent, with poverty, dreams, terror, a witch, salvation and lots to eat, bad parents humbled (most gratifying of all). If you’re an adult, or anyway an opera critic, you may claim to be terrified by the children-roasting oven, but maturer youngsters won’t worry about that. L’enfant et les sortilèges can similarly and more sophisticatedly appeal to adults of all ages from eight, with plenty of typically Gallic doubles entendres. The latter’s text, by Colette, is cited by Middleton as a model of compactness. However, Pinocchio is not compact. The performance lasts nearly three hours, and there are undeniable longueurs.
The production at the Grand Theatre is brilliant, lavish but fast-moving, with some stupendous transformation scenes, the most spectacular being towards the end, when Pinocchio is swallowed by a whale and reunited with his maker, and then they are ejected on to dry land. Alas, and typically, nothing that’s going on in the music is anywhere near as exciting as what we see. One can have a marvellous time listening to a recording of Hansel or L’enfant, but I wouldn’t survive one of Pinocchio, and I don’t think anyone could. Dove’s music, as in his successful Flight, is partly onomatopoeic, partly a matter of tunefulness without tunes, that plight of so many would-be popular operas. It aims to do something more than the average movie score, and it does a little more, but not enough.
Fortunately, not only are the production of Martin Duncan and the sets and costumes of Francis O’Connor endlessly resourceful and entertaining, the whole of the very large cast, many of them playing several roles, is also magnificent. Victoria Simmonds is unflagging in the title role, with the opening sequence, in which she is crying out to be made and all we see is a large block of wood, as arresting as anything that follows, and more moving. The old carpenter Geppetto who makes him is Jonathan Summers at his finest, and the whole of this opening scene raises expectations which only a work of genius could fulfil.
Invidiously I shall only otherwise mention Mary Plazas as the Blue Fairy, who flies or floats on and sings music which seems at any moment likely to become that of the Dew Fairy in Hansel, an unwise echo. Plazas has retained her capacity to sound young and ethereal, and hasn’t been damaged by the heavy roles she has recently been taking on. But it is invidious to mention her: if this work were to be filmed, it should be with just this set of performers in this production.
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