The maid         Heather Buck
The electrician  Daniel Norman
The duchesss     Mary Plazas
Hotel manager    Graeme Broadbent

Conductor        Thomas Ades
Director         David Alden

Almeida Opera

At the end of Powder her face, by Thomas Ades and Philip Hensher, a
gramophone  plays a scratchy, music-less accompaniment as the elderly
duchess leaves for the last time the hotel room she can't afford, thrown
out by a sinister manager she can't seduce. The gramophone aspires to Lulu,
but in this production, the LPs propped up against the wall beside it are
The rake's progress and Der Dreigroschenoper.

There is certainly something Hogarthian about the Almeida, with its steeply
raked gallery and tight-packed stalls. But I was left with the same sense
of there being less to Powder her face than meets the eye that I had from
Stravinsky's Rake. I think my main problem is that it takes the core event
of much opera, a woman is destroyed, grinds up a range of associated ideas
and reshapes them like the meat chunks you get in cheap pies.

Not that Marg of Arg would admit ever to having met a cheap pie. The
libretto, constructed as a prologue in 1990 and eight scenes that move
forward from 1935, plots her career of wealth and desire to its messy
conclusion when she suddenly realises that neither work for her any more
and, effectively, goes off to die. The focus is on physical corruption over
time, things congealing and falling apart. But the recurring organic fluids
(milk, aspic, never-mentioned but omni-present semen) have more than a
touch of a structuralist's grid, probably from Honey and ashes.

The music similarly does a bit of everything schematically. The overture is
a very messy tango, which sounded close to incompetent rather than
degenerate. There are frequent attempts to evoke the potency of cheap
music, and a fake thirties song allegedly written for the duchess which the
programme claims is like Cole Porter on acid. (She was Mrs Sweeney in
You're sensational.) There are Straussian bits.  Richard, with nods towards
the Marschallin and her problems with time, Johann, the maid has an
Adele-ish laughing waltz, and Oscar, with tinkly fantasy film music. And
some brutal noises which are quite effective, including a jarring obsessive
rhythm as the duchess realises that she can't just walk away after the
divorce trial, and smashing champagne bottles as her world falls apart at
the end. (I was sitting at the side and could see the bottles going into
the dustbin in the flies. I can't swear that they were proper champagne
bottles, but I hope they were.)

David Alden's production managed to produce something quite interesting,
though not exactly enjoyable, from not much. It emphasised time and ritual
rather than decay, in a way which recalls his Poppea, another target which
Ades and Hensher fail to hit. A pendulum shaped like the hand of a clock
swings across the stage to mark the passing of time in the first act. After
the polaroid, similar clock hands were stuck in the walls and floor of the
stage, suggesting that time had started working in a different, static and
painful way. At the end, the stage was a complete mess, and the electrican
was beginning to burn her stuff left behind in the hotel, suggesting either
purification or the end of time in the general conflagration.

The performers were all in white-face. All except the duchess (who wore
couture and furs throughout) suggested commedia dell'arte types, or at
least conventional operatic comic servants (see also Valetto and
Damigella). The hotel manager first appeared in a very tall black top hat,
looking like an undertaker or emissary of death. Later incarnations were
similarly cartoonish, with journalists at the trial with snouts and the
duke in a kilt.

The singers' performances themselves were all impressive, going on
outstanding. Heather Buck sang fluidly and showed great comic skill in a
variety of roles, including the duke's mistress, in this production doing a
school-girl/nurse/dominatrix schtick that got the tone of 1950s prurience
rather well. Daniel Norman was a natural cheeky-chappie electrician who
distinguished several servant roles skillfully. He also has a pretty good
tenor voice. (I remember him having a great hammy time as the evangelist in
the Bach St John Passion last year.) Graeme Broadbent had a touch of John
Cleese, particularly as the judge who gets utterly carried away with his
disgust, and also some elegant high notes and a growly bottom register.

Mary Plazas as the duchess delivered a tour de force, a disconcerting blend
of Thatcher's hair-style and profile and Callas' screaming mouth, with
moments of extreme intensity. She was calculatedly sensual, and
particularly striking as the old duchess, all dismissive hauteur, grotesque
but solid inside while everything fell to pieces around her. Her singing
was also grand and authoritative, even when she was being absurd.