Jane Manning

Director Robert Shaw

Inside Intelligence

Peter Maxwell Davies' forty-five minute opera for unaccompanied soprano can
be seen as a companion piece to Eight songs for a mad king, an exploration
of the anima to match the pre-enlightenment madman's free-wheeling animus.

The medium begins welcoming visitors into her fortune-teller's tent and
asking them to cross her palm with silver before offering a conventional
fortune, then in a different, stomach, voice, an acerbic judgement. It soon
emerges that she is in fact a patient in an asylum channeling the events of
her life, traumatized by being raped and giving birth when she was only a
child herself. She acts out her story, set in a world similar to Coward's
Blithe spirit, playing the roles of her stuffy mother and the cockney maid
who discovers her after she has been raped. Her visions are haunted by
ambiguous figures of a desired angel and a changeling child (both herself
and the lost baby), and of the rapist, who turns out to be also the
electroconvulsive "therapy" machine to which she is subjected.

The peformance is both an extended operatic mad scene and a complete
narrated drama. The medium is a medium precisely because she is split from
herself by the trauma and by identification with her lost baby. She
presents fragments of her experience as if of a third person, as well as
identifying with her lost baby. Her musical vocabularly includes Anglican
and Catholic hymns, notably a setting of Anima Christi, and a hymn to St
Ignatius that mentions his characteristic sword, apparently attempts to
reintegrate her experience into that of polite society. It
also includes a recurring, heart-breaking song about being a changeling and
other allusions to children's music.

This production, in Studio 2 at BAC, consisted of the medium's chair and
some glistening synthetic drapery at the back of the performance area,
presumably the tent and alluding to the amorphous angelic vision. Jane
Manning also wore grey-white drapery, half way between a mummy and Madame
Arcati. She began and ended the performance sitting on the chair with a
hood pulled backwards over her face.

Manning's performance was astounding. She does not look fragile, but she
made up for it with an extreme sense of pain and agonizing moments of
ecstatic beauty. Even more amazingly, she did not seem to be affected when
she came out of character at the end, but beamed cheerfully at the
audience.