DR
DEE
ENO
at the Coliseum
07.07.12
"Well
that was bizarre …" as we made our way out onto St Martin's
Lane. Couldn't argue.
This
"English Opera" from Albarn and Norris, first seen in
Manchester last year, has just ended its modest, not well-attended,
run at the Coliseum.
As
a piece of music theatre, I felt it succeeded better with the spectacle
and the stagecraft than it did with the score. Albarn himself
plays a kind of troubadour narrator, and his band – period
instruments very much in evidence – is on a stage platform lift.
And in the pit, the orchestra with Stephen Higgins. The music is
generally easy on the ear, without being memorable or particular
apposite. Sometimes, we get a lively repetitive rhythm going –
Nothing Is Unlawful – which could almost be Philip Glass. And there
is some fine singing – though everyone seems to be amplified –
notably from Steven Page's Walsingham and Christopher Robson as the
charlatan scryer Kelley. But much of the text is inaudible, and
without surtitles, the subtleties of the story largely passed me by.
And I'm afraid that, for me, Albarn's voice tends to drag the
mystical down to the mundane.
But
the spectacle is often memorable – animated projections of geometry
and astrology, not unlike Prospero's Books, the masque of the Virgin
Queen, the column of sand pouring onto Paul Hilton's dark, sinister
Dee at the end of Act One, the ravens who fly down onto the stage at
the beginning and the end, the Horrible Histories procession
prologue, and especially the books – the young Dee discovers his
thirst for knowledge early, and the pages move around ceaselessly,
for scene changes and more projection, and leaves flutter down to
carpet the stage. All beautifully done. But very bizarre.
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