Going nowhere
Michael Tanner
A Streetcar Named Desire El N ilia Barbican
When a play is well known to everyone in an educated audience, and in a particular production at that, there must be a special urgency to the question: Why set it to music? In the case of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, there is the familiar, overwhelming movie version with unforgettable performances by Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, and for many people that simply is the play. What can an operatic version add?
In the first place, the text will have to be reduced drastically, as Philip Littell, Andre Previn's librettist, has, while remaining very close to Williams in what remains (Mitch's weight is upped from 207 to 270 pounds, considerately); but unless the whole import of the work is to be altered, as with Verdi's versions of Shakespeare and Schiller plays, one will expect the atmosphere and the characterisation to remain the same, only intensified, or what's the point?
Williams's play is notable for the instantaneous creation of a tense, nervous, humid, sentimental and therefore potentially violent ethos, with the dreadful polarity of Blanche and Stanley soon established and played out with hideous inevitability. From the word go it's clear that Blanche is using all available resources, pathetically limited as they are, to hold herself together; and that Stanley is aware of that, and determined to make her come apart so that her sister, his wife Stella, can see what an abject fake she is. But if anyone didn't know the play, and went to one of the two staged performances of Previn's opera at the Barbican, with costumes but minimal props and no scenery, they would have no idea from the performance, authoritative as it must have been, that anything alarming was in the air.
Blanche was performed by Renee Fleming, likely to expire only from an overdose of poise. Nothing about her suggested dire straits, and nothing in Previn's music, or in the way he conducted it, made up for what she lacked. One gazed at the text — the Barbican now uses thoroughly legible surtitles, a major improvement — and wondered how Previn can possibly have thought his music enforced or indeed was in any way relevant to it. To describe the score as film music, as some commentators have, is to insult a medium which even at less than its best can enormously enhance the effect of a movie, and at its best can virtually save a mediocre one from disaster.
Rodney Gilfry's Stanley was scarcely better, seeming to be nothing more than a continuation of his Nathan in Sophie's Choice last year, something of which I had hoped never to be reminded. He exudes non-sexuality, so the confrontations between him and Blanche, so cumulatively shattering in the movie and even in amateur productions I've seen, generated only lassitude. The strongest performance by far was the late-substituting Janice Watson as Stella, though Anthony Dean Griffey made a decently ineffectual Mitch, Of the various dud new operas I've seen in the last few years this was the duddest. No one with an inkling of what makes opera a great art-form could have anything but contempt for it.
John Adams's El Nirio is only an opera in an extended sense of an already loose term, but at least it's fun. As far as mixed media go, this is about as maximalist as you'll find, with singers miming, surrounded by dancers, home movies projected on a screen behind the stage, and surtitles in Spanish and English high above the action and the orchestra and chorus. It's a kind of Nativity play, with
the folksy naivete that implies, though since it's Adams, with Peter Sellars as accomplice, it's cunning too. The texts are biblical and ecclesiastical, with a sticky glue of recent female Spanish poets.
The work is in two parts, each of about an hour. Part I has some longueurs, Part II is more dynamic, varied and in its ending enjoyably kitschy. The composer conducted, a colourful and sympathetic figure conveying pulse and energy. Individual performers are not the point in this piece, but Willard White is now a figure who can't help commanding a stage, and his voice is at present in fabulous condition. Dawn Upshaw and Kirsti Harms were tireless, and I think quite heavily miked. Contemporary references were stressed in the movie shots, which seemed to be mainly in and around LA, with law enforcement officers now weepy, now smiling. In case we should get too dewy-eyed about the miracle of birth (in general, and not only the Virgin Birth), Herod's massacre of the innocents came as a welcome contrast, and was updated to the overthrow of a Mexican youth revolt in 1968. There's no denying the vitality and occasional lovely calm of Adams's music, but even as one is enjoying it one feels that, for any given piece, a couple of hearings or seeings is enough.
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