Flight, by Jonathan Dove, libretto by April de Angelis Minsk woman Anne Mason Controller Claron McFadden Tina Mary Plazas Stewardess Ann Taylor Older woman Nuala Willis Immigration Officer Richard Van Allan Bill Richard Coxon Steward Garry Magee Minsk man Steven Page Refugee Christopher Robson Conductor David Parry Director Richard Jones Glyndebourne Touring Orchestra Flight, a new opera by Jonathan Dove and April de Angelis, has had fairly sniffy reviews. It works for me as an evocation of the strange theatre of air travel, and Richard Jones' detailed production in irritating shades of airport beige is first rate. Set in a slightly stylized airport departure lounge, the opera depicts the interactions of a group of people waiting for flights: a Trouble-in-Tahiti couple, Tina and Bill, going on holiday to try to sort out their marriage with a ghastly self-help book; the Minsk couple, a diplomat and his pregnant wife headed for a "new life" (for him) in Minsk; a steward and stewardess who sneak off for a quickie at every opportunity; and an older woman, waiting for her twenty-two-year old fiance to arrive from Mallorca "on Wednesday". These characters are a bit awful, but as a result of the stress everybody is under. The audience cheers when Bill has a brief fling in the control tower with the steward and finally admits that it was fantastic,and cheers again when Tina loses her temper and knees him in the groin. Something like a John Godber play. But a gently mythological framework makes the events of the opera into more than a fragment of soap. A controller oversees the airport from above. She despises the mess and confusion the passengers create, but ensures that everything runs smoothly (with some funny poetic versions of the usual airport announcements). She helps and protects to the refugee, who is trapped in the airport without papers and going nowhere. The immigration officer reports to the controller but is out of her control, since he is trying to arrest the refugee and have him sent home (where he will presumably be killed). Roughly speaking, the controller is a kind of Homeric deity, remote but capable of feeling for (selected) humans, and the immigration officer is a figure of justice, which even the gods cannot change. The refugee is the focal figure in the opera. His situation is the most poignant, both because he has been through the most (stowing away in the undercarriage of a plane, with his twin brother who froze to death and fell) and because he is a traveller who is going nowhere and that is the best he can hope for. At one point, the older woman offers to marry him so that he can enter the country, a suggestion which the immigration officer unrealistically accepts. But the controller claims that he belongs to her, and the opera ends with a beautiful duet for the two high voices in which he accepts that "this is my home", perhaps as a kind of Adonis held between life and death. At the same time, the refugee is the most human of the characters, initially panhandling the other travellers and effectively introducing them to each other by setting up patterns of mutual need and sympathy. He is also a Hermes-like figure, tricking all of the characters into hope by giving them each a "unique" magic stone. When they discover this, the women beat him up and knock him unconscious, and fearing he is dead hide him in a trunk. He wakes up and emerges just as the Minsk woman's baby is born. (Her entire labour and childbirth take about sixteen bars. This isn't entirely realistic.) This whole mixture of symbolism and sympathetic realism reminded me of Henry Green's Party going, or maybe TS Eliot's The cocktail party, though the lack of pretension is closer to Green. The libretto is similarly a blend of poetic and realistic language. The music generally follows the dynamics of the drama, in more-or-less Adams-minimalist style, with a number of ensemble pieces and arias in a more Berstein/Sondheim manner. The music is never less than interesting and enjoyable, but on reflection I think there's a problem with pacing. Somehow the crisis in the second act isn't quite critical enough because the music doesn't let rip at any point. It's all slightly cerebral, getting into the emotional knots of the various situations rather than tension and release. This certainly isn't the fault of the Glyndebourne Touring Orchestra and David Parry, who delivered it with wonderful clarity and coherence. The singers were all extremely good and effective. Christopher Robson as the refugee was very moving and mysterious, singing his lyrical passages beautifully, or perhaps acting beautiful singing. His aria describing the loss of his brother as they stowed away on the plane was very powerful indeed. Claron McFadden was icy but passionate in the stratospheric role of the controller (somewhere between the queen of the night and the chief of secret police, though with a lot less coloratura than either). Nuala Willis was funny and touching as the older woman who's been through it all but still hopes that her young lover will show up, and Mary Plazas sang and acted forcefully as Tina. Steven Page was funny and unpleasant as the self-centred diplomat who turns out to love his wife. One small reservation I have is one that is probably an inevitable consequence of the blend of realism and myth in the opera.The refugee is treated sympathetically, and his essential situation is realistic enough. But there is no sense of the xenophobia which refugees who arrive at British airports experience, of the common assumption that they are generally bogus, or of the inhumanity of the way they are often treated, with detention for no reason and without basic support, while their requests for asylum are processed. But that's probably a different story.