The devil's drum, Edward Dudley Hughes (London premiere)

Tailor      Daniel Norman
Wife/Devil  Leigh Woolf

Conducted by the composer


Eight songs for a mad king

Robert Rice

Conductor    Patrick Bailey


Actors       Sarah Denys-Jones, Philip Dinsdale, Simon Edwards
Director     Fraser Grant
Solaris Ensemble

These two short pieces of music theatre were developed and previously
performed as part of a schools project in Suffolk and Hertfordshire. The
progamme began with Fall, leaves, fall, a new work by Hywel Davies,
performed by the Hackney Saturday Music School Chamber Orchestra. Music and
the performing arts have been pretty much squeezed out of the national
curriculum, so it's good to see such fine work going on.

A fair proportion of the audience was inevitably related to the orchestral
performers, but they clearly appreciated the other works -- even the very
small girl on one side of me, and the fidgety boy on the other, who both
gradually tuned into King George during the Mozartian passages and hung on
to the diminuendo "howling" at the end with everybody else.

The devil's drum has a libretto by Roger Morris, based on his short story
from  a series called Grimmer fairy tales. It is a simple, sinister story
about the power of music. A band comes to town, and the tailor wants to
play the drum like that. The drummer, who is the devil, asks him for his
old mother, and the tailor agrees. Similarly, he gives his daughter to play
the fiddle, and his wife to sing, until finally he is asked for, and gives,
his soul to become music itself. The question remains whether the devil can
have the man's soul when it is in the music.

Edward Dudley Hughes music is straightforward, using the rhymnic excitement
of traditional music to build up to the tailor's total destruction or
apotheosis, whichever it is. The Solaris Ensemble were energetic, and the
singers (who sang the narrative as well as the roles) were sometimes
drowned. Leigh Woolf looked very devilish in 1970s suede, though, as did
the acting devil, in eighteenth-century gear. The direction was economical
-- large dice for the actors to stand on, some interaction with the
instrumentalist -- but effective.

Eight songs for a mad king is archetypically a work of the 1960s, using
madness as a way in to various mental and experiential states, and this
production was yer basic Marat Sade. Cabbages (one of the singer's
obsessions) on sticks about the stage, the singer in a straitjacket and the
other performers, including the instrumentalists and conductor, in surgical
smocks, with wigs for the actors. The actors all represented
eighteenth-century surgeons and inflicted the expected clinical cruelties
on the singer.

But I think this mise en scene is justified in detail. Davies gives the
singer mad (and presumably voice-damaging) vocalizations, but he also
provides musical hints about the context of the singer's madness in
quotations of style and melody. Each song is named after a traditional
British dance or song. A Mozartian except is a reminder of the rationality
of the Enlightenment that forms the political and social background to
George III's reign, and also of course to the treatment of madness. There
is also a moving quotation of both words and music of Comfort ye, my
people, from the Messiah, which suggests the singer's fatherly view of his
kingship and the emotional side of English national identity. There is also
a revue-style segment about having fun in Windsor in the same song, which
(like The varsity rag in The ruling class) might have been deeply shocking
when it was first performed, but looks like a 1960s mannerism now.

Robert Rice's performance was totally committed (I haven't seen anyone look
quite so shaken up at the end of a performance since Barry McGovern's
Beckett show), and he delivered the shifts and contrasts in vocal and
theatrical style very dramatically. His vocalizations were precise, but not
always very forceful. Though the music was written for Roy Hart, a
performer with an incredible range of vocal skills.

The orchestra was energetic and dramatic, again, though I missed some of
the contrasts of musical style in the quotations.