Maria Laura Lahera
El Duende Dirk Van Esbroek
Singer Jose Luis Barreto
Barkeeper Harry Deswarte

Stage director Franke Van Laecke

I Fiamminghi

This production of Astor Piazolla's Maris de Buenos Aires (its UK premiere)
not only managed to miss the point but also made the music sound dreary. It
probably wasn't the fault of the band, who gave an exhilarating account of
one of Piazolla's tangos as a encore. Rather, the shapeless direction
didn't give the performers anything to communicate, and the tatty
amplification seriously undermined their ability to do so.
Ultra-perfunctory dancing didn't help either. In fact, the most convincing
evocation of Buenos Aires of the evening was the putative porteno lowlife
handing out adverts for tango classes outside the theatre.

The production set the whole action in a bar with a brothel upstairs, and
populated it with a bartender, who translated a few of the numbers into
English, El Duende, writing at a desk, Maria, and a pair of dancers who did
little except take Maria upstairs at one point. The poetry of the streets,
the port itself, Roman catholicism, the psychiatrists, all disappeared from
the performance, which reduced Horacio Ferrer's baroque lyrics to cheap
torch songs for a plastic Piaf. (All the choruses were cut.) El Duende
appeared to be a poet hanging out in a low bar, not implausibly since he
creates, destroys and resurrects Maria as the poet does. But he was
seriously lacking in ambiguity of any kind, let alone supernatural
qualities.

A number of people, including one or two who might have been thinking about
adding Maria de Buenos Aires to a season at some point, left swiftly in the
interval. Which was perhaps the justification for having an interval of
twenty-five minutes in a seventy-five minute performance. Hopefully, the
movers and shakers will see Gidon Kremer's lot peforming Maria at Bregenz
and think again. Even better, maybe we can have Kremer in London soon.