Violent voices
Michael Tanner
Several great composers have been drawn throughout their lives to writing an opera on King Lear. Fortunately the two who were most celebratedly tempted by the idea. Verdi and Britten, finally resisted it. Can we be sure that their resistance to this supreme temptation was fortunate? Perhaps not absolutely sure, since in the world of the great creators nothing is certain in advance, and Verdi's Macbeth is a miracle which nothing preceding it gives any forewarning of. But the trouble with Lear, if that is the way to put it, is that it has achieved such an unassailably iconic position in our culture as the most terrible and harrowing of tragedies, the one that takes us to the very limits of art, and art to the limits of our endurance (or, with Dr Johnson, beyond them), that if a composer were
to succeed in intensifying its impact we wouldn't be able to sustain the impact of his achievement, and anything else seems merely dull impertinence.
If. rashly. Lear is to be put into another medium, the only possibility of success would seem to be a drastic adaptation by an artist of genius. Aribert Reimann's Lear is not by an artist of genius, nor was the singer for whom the title role was written one, so the result is flatulent rhetoric, hollow, repulsive, a demeaning and ridiculous effort. Much more impressive, but not an opera, is Kurosawa's great film Ran, but that has little more than the broad outlines of the story in common with Shakespeare's play. Now another Japanese, Toshio Hosokawa, has come up with an opera with a complicated relationship to the play, a work which was commissioned for the Munich Biennale in 1998, and apparently highly acclaimed by the critics. It has, anyway, led to his being commissioned to write a second opera for the Salzburg festival. Vision of Lear was put on at the Linbury Studio Theatre last week by Memos Collective, in what seemed to be an altogether ideal account. though since I have no independent line on the piece, my view is determined by what I saw and heard.
The premise of the work is that there are sufficiently strong analogies between the subject matter of Shakespeare's play and the downturn in Japan's economy in the 1990s. with the consequent redundancies and dovvnsizings, for our reactions to the first to be made more immediate, and our reactions to the second to become more nuanced and sympathetic than they might be, at least on the part of many of us. The opera begins with a Salaryman reading the play, and then getting down to his day's work while imagining his colleagues into the roles of some of its characters. Office ladies become his daughters, male colleagues are Gloucester, Cornwall, Edgar and Edmund, though no one is Kent or, more surprisingly, the Fool. The staging consists mainly of swivel chairs, the characters miming working their computers and using their mobile phones. Rather vague images are projected onto the back screen. There isn't a lot of action. The text, in English, is listed in the programme as being adapted from Shakespeare. What I heard was almost all direct quotation, but clearly of a highly selective kind, since the opera lasts for less than two hours.
What action there is nearly all involves Gloucester. His eyes are put out in a scene which, as always, is horribly disturbing; he encounters Poor Tom, the Salaryman who has discarded his suit and started wheeling a supermarket trolley around, and when that falls over Gloucester mounts it and throws himself off in a telling reminiscence of that bizarre and moving episode in the play. Lear sits watching, and then, after a long absence, rejoins the action. There is a certain amount of golfing. Having been treated with the ruthlessness that one associated with large corporations and having had a nervous breakdown, Lear seems to lose the office lady who played Cordelia, and sings some of the play's closing lines; but the action at that point is obscure.
The cast is uniformly excellent, its only well-known member, Patricia Rozario, who plays Regan, both singing and acting with virtuoso panache, but no more than anyone else. They are accompanied by a small orchestra, skilfully controlled by Gregory Rose, veteran of many experimental musico-theatrical ventures. The idiom is eclectic, passages of 'Eastern' colour alternating with five stringed instruments and two winds; glissandi are employed fairly often. The music becomes violent and noisy towards the end, with some well-thwacked percussion. The singers, especially Lear, forcefully taken by Nicholas Garrett, are required to speak, shriek, indulge in Sprechstimme and sing falsetto as well as in a more conventional way. It remains unclear that any of the musical effects adds anything. I wasn't bored, indeed was occasionally stirred, but always by words and actions from the play, which would have been still more moving without adaptation.
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