The torture of hope
London
Coliseum
11/17/00 - and 22, 25, 29 November, 13 December
Luciano Berio Folk songs, Nino Rota La strada, Luigi
Dallapiccola The prisoner
Susan Parry (mezzo), Susan Bullock (Mother), Peter Coleman-Wright
(Prisoner), Peter Bronder (Gaoler/Grand Inquisitor), Richard Roberts (First
Priest), Mark Richardson (Second Priest)
ENO Orchestra and Chorus
Richard Hickox (conductor), Neil Armfield (director)
Dallapiccola‘s The prisoner, written in 1949 and reflecting the
composer‘s experiences during the two world wars, is an ideal choice to
represent twentieth-century Italian opera in the ENO Italian season. It has
an recognisably twentieth-century musical style and reflects events
(hopefully) unique to the century but it is linked to earlier Italian opera
in various ways, notably by the fact that its eponymous hero is a prisoner
of the Inquisition in Spanish-occupied Flanders under Philip II. The
production reintroduced the marks of Italian fascism that Dallapiccola
deliberately excluded by his choice of historical setting, but kept the
power and horror in a superbly sung and played performance. Susan Bullock
was heart-rending as the mother seeing her imprisoned son for the last
time, Peter Coleman-Wright was powerful as the nameless prisoner and Peter
Bronder was a sinisterly fraternal guard who raised the prisoner’s hope of
liberty before reappearing as the Inquisitor to execute him. Richard Hickox
and the ENO orchestra made the music frighteningly lucid.
Neil Armfield’s production, on a shapeless dark set where the cell was
represented by a square of light, included a small child in bed who,
abandoned by his nurse, gave in to night-time terror as the prisoner
realised that his hope was merely an additional torture by his captors. The
underlying idea (which Armfield suggested in press interviews) was that
fascism and its antecedents and variants is a perversion of the family,
offering protection and support in return for obedience and submission, and
extracting a terrible price for disloyalty.
Armfield’s productions of the other two works on the programme (neither of
them strictly opera) similarly played out the idea of children as witnesses
to cruelty and love, and also as unwitting agents of unhappiness. Susan
Parry sang Berio’s Folk Songs, almost all adult love songs, to three
children, interacting with them as if she were their mother, playing,
suggesting tentative complicity and responding to rejection. There seemed
to be something about the pain of parental love, but the children also
conveyed the joy of the music and especially the rhythm by their informal
dances.
Nino Rota’s music for the film La Strada was performed as a dance
drama by school students of all ages from the Baylis programme. In a street
setting, where the only adults were a passing band and an ice-cream seller,
the children act out their strongly gendered fantasies, the boys playing at
cowboys and Indians, the girls dancing and pushing prams. A box drops from
the sky and turns out to contain a wedding gown. The girls dance with it,
then one of boys puts it on and dances expressively. He is bundled into the
box, then driven out. At the end of the music, a proscenium arch appears at
the back of the stage and another boy wearing the dress invites all the
children to pass through it. Only the original dress-wearer is left
outside, presumably too badly damaged by his experience to enter the world
of imagination. Some of this was deeply moving, some of it was
incomprehensible or dull, but the performances were all impressive, and the
music was irresistible.
H.E. Elsom