Opera
Plat& (Royal Opera, Barbican)
Absurd behaviour
Michael Tanner
Remaining in the mid-18th century for their second production at the Barbican, the Royal Opera has mounted Rameau's Plat& very splendidly, perhaps even giving it with more resources and resourcefulness than it deserves.
I wonder whether Offenbach knew this opera, which impartially sends up gods, humans, and whatever order of beings marsh nymphs belong to. Nothing unusual in that — go to almost any production of the Ring these years and you will see the same kind of thing on a much larger scale. The only difference is that in Plat& it's what the composer intended. The more obvious point of reference, though, is Offenbach, working the same vein in the same city a bit more than a century later. As with Offenbach, the satire on life is specifically the operatic conventions of the time. Since we know what Offenbach is satirising more familiarly than we know the precise idioms that Rameau sends up, we are likely to find Offenbach more amusing — or would do if we ever had a chance to see him properly performed. I suspect, in fact, that if someone were to mount an authentic series of productions of Offen- bach operettas the ecstatic reception of Plat& would be seen to be somewhat over- enthusiastic. As it is, each new resuscitation of the Baroque is greeted with a rapture which could itself provide an excellent topic for a comic opera, if only we had any musical comedians around.
Plat& begins with a Prologue invoking the spirit of comedy, played in a Twenties American bar, which generates a suitably louche atmosphere without being obviously pointful; Bacchus is indecent in a broad 'Not ambrosia and nectar again.' sort of way, Thespis, as the inventor of comedy, is a soak, brilliantly portrayed by Mark Padmore. Francois Le Roux, later to be Jupiter, is Momus, personification of sarcasm. The clientele of the bar are a racy collection, and it's all carried off with such brio that the quality of the music hardly matters. When the action proper begins, the set changes to something much more charming and appropriately evocative, and Plat& herself, a travesti part played and sung with genius by Jean-Paul Fouche- court, appears. The designer Isaac Mizrahi has pulled off the coup of making Plat& utterly grotesque without her being a strain to look at for the rest of the evening, indeed having a kind of ET-style winning- ness. Her celebrations of her own attrac- tiveness are touching, too. Above all, Fouchecourt sings his large part without ever lapsing into vocal ugliness, while leav- ing us in no doubt that the character he is portraying is absurd. I note that he sings Offenbach, and would love to hear him in that — and also as Mime. The role sounds fiendishly hard, though he dispatches it with amphibian coolness.
He also sings in good French, as one would expect; several of the cast notably don't, perhaps most conspicuously Nicole Tibbels as La Folie, a key part, naturally, in the action. Her gusto even so enables her to sweep through the role. It is rare to find an operatic comedy acted with such aban- don by everyone, none of the performers hamming, all of them confident about what to do, as well as what to sing, next. Presum- ably credit for this near-miracle is largely due to Mark Morris, whose Dance Group are co-stars with the singers. They are immaculate, thank God, since anything less entertaining than they produce would make the evening seem gruellingly long.
Nicholas McGegan in the pit generates all the vitality that Ivor Bolton failed to for the far greater Giulio Cesare, though even he manages to make the music itself sound funny on only three or four occasions. Too often it is prone to commit what used to be called the Fallacy of Imitative Form, the mistake of conveying boredom by being boring. The cruelly prolonged mock-woo- ing of Plat& by Jupiter is the most flagrant example of that, though the imagination of Morris is even able to provide diversions from that diversion.
In the brief Act III Diana Montague at last appeared as the jealous Junon; it's for her jealous benefit that the whole action is devised; and in her magnificent rage, her singing stunning in its power and attack, her acting on the same level, made me wish — but only momentarily — that I was see- ing an opera seria. Mark Padmore's Mer- cure is the equal of his Thespis: descending in his chariot, looking like the Mad Hatter (or Bertrand Russell) he provided a fitting- ly dry counter to Fouchecourt's slimy appeal. As with every aspect of the produc- tion, a precarious balance, just what the work needs, is sustained.
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