Night banquet, by Gou Wenjing, text by Zhou Jingzhi, commissioned by Almeida Opera, the Hong Kong Festival and the Contemporary Chamber Orchestra, Taipei. World premiere. Emperor Nigel Robson Hongzhu Yvonne Barclay Singer Miyuki Morimoto Gu Hongzhong Richard Jackson Zhou Wenju Meurig Davies Han Xi-zai Geoffrey Moses Pipa player Wu Man Wolf cub village, by Gou Wenjing, text by Gou Wenjing and Zeng Li, based on Diary of a madman by Lu Xun (1918). British premiere. Madman Nigel Robson Dr He John Tranter Elder brother Richard Jackson Ghost Yvonne Barclay Village girl Miyuki Morimoto Mother/witch Frances McCafferty Passers by Timothy Bill, Meurig Davies, Fan Chan Kong, Nicholas Garrett Conductor Brad Cohen Director James MacDonald Design Thomas Hadley The Almeida Ensemble Both these short operas by Guo Wenjing are about someone who fails to get a job because of mad behaviour, and both confront the obvious issues of the need to fit in and elisions of truth it entails. They also both have a central role for a virtuoso singing actor. But they have contrasting musical and theatrical styles and time-settings, and make a first-rate double bill. The night banquet is set at the end of the Southern Tang dynasty. The emperor Li Yu is a poet, not a soldier, and knows that he cannot defend the country against the invaders. He asks Han Xizai to become prime minister, and effectively to preside over the destruction of his country. Han Xizai refuses repeated and tries to discredit himself by feasting and carousing. When he discovers (though divination) that he is about to be visited by two painters, effectively, journalists, he puts on a debauched show with his favourite concubine, and launches a megalomanic tirade at them. As the painters leave to destroy his reputation for good, he reflects that his life is finally resolved, and mourns the destruction of his country, represented in a furious brief instrumental passage. This short opera, lasting about 45 minutes, manages to raise the big questions about public duty and personal morality, and also to take a swipe at the intrusions of the press. The painters say to Hongzhu, the concubine, that Han is offending against Confucian values, but they crow over how they are going to paint his outrageous actions. Han's debauched behaviour is in fact a means of avoiding making a bad situation worse, for his country as well as himself. You could ask whether, like Kent in King Lear, he doesn't engage with too much relish in his outburst, in which he says that his house is the universe, his clothes are the earth, and his guests are "in his pants", presumably like vermin or like his genitals. I think this is a clinically plausibly simulation of madness, but it's also a striking, potentially satirical, image. The music is orientalizing but basically contemporary western, with some additional Chinese instruments -- a very breathy sounding bamboo flute and a cool, hippy looking drum -- and non-standard techniques like bowing in strange places. (It strikes me that a lot of what string players in particular are asked to do by contemporary composers is what my teachers described as messing around and told me firmly to stop doing.) The set consisted of a raised couch in the centre of the stage, on which Han cavorted, and a window at the back in which the emperor sat and wrote. The costumes were, possibly, in period, and certainly "historical" looking. Titles, typed on an elderly manual typewriter by the look of them, were projected on a small screen behind the couch. Not everything was translated, but the key text seemed to appear at the right moments. Geoffrey Moses was opaque, but very powerful, as Han. At first he seemed sinister, but as the action progressed it became clear that his impassivity came from (effectively) depression, or deep sadness. He seemed deal confidently with some extravagent sounding falsetto passages, though I've no idea what they were supposed to sound like. Yvonne Barclay was elegant as Hongzhu, and Richard Jackson and Meurig Davies were suitably coarse as the painters. Nigel Robson as the emperor looked a bit like the pope in his heavy yellow vestment. His spoken passages sounded as if he were doing Pierrot Lunaire. The person next to me confirmed my impression that all the other performers made a pretty good job of the spoken Mandarin. I also asked her whether, and how, the Mandarin pitches, which affect the meaning of words, can be set in music. Apparently, it's similar to setting English sentence pitches: sometimes you can do it, using relative pitches for example, sometimes you have to rely on the context for the listener to pick up the words. I may have garbled this explanation slightly -- if it's wrong, it's my fault, not hers. Wolf cub village is based on a story written in 1918 which is apparently the first Chinese story written in the western style, using colloquial language. It's roughly similar to the nearly contempory film, The cabinet of Dr Caligari (with a touch of Flanders and Swann's Eating people is wrong). The madman, faced with the violent and hostile reactions of the people in his village, their use of metaphors of biting and devouring, and the symbolic cannibalism in the workings of the law and medicine, believes that everyone around him is a cannibal. Forced to take a therapeutic drug by Dr He, and exorcised by a witch, he realises that he too is part of the great (metaphorical) web of dog-eat-dog violence, competition and aggression. There is an implication that his madness is the result of his mourning for the death of his sister, whose ghost appears to him and sings of peace, darkness and loneliness, the opposites of the smelly corporeality of village life. The set was the same raised platform in the centre of the stage, with a screen that formed the back of the madman's room. The area around the central platform was the outside. Images, for example, trees in negative and positive, candles seen from above, were projected on to the screen, along with mainly hand-written titles. I though these would be difficult to read, but after some initial (deliberate?) fuzziness, they were fine. The costumes and general production style were Brecht-proletarian. The role of the madman is ideal for Nigel Robson, who also performed it in Amsterdam, and suggested the opera for the Almeida. His performance was semi-clinical and sometimes disturbingly intense, but always sympathetic. Yvonne Barclay was very moving as the ghost, and Frances McCafferty's near baritonal witch was striking. The ensemble were good and threatening as the violent villagers, never clear whether they were everyday thugs and idiots or the madman's paranoid vision of "normal" people. There are more performances on 13, 15, 17 and 18 July. If you're in London and at all interested in music theatre, this is one to see. The person I spoke to at the box office told me that her dog would be appearing, but I didn't see it. I hope it didn't misbehave and get banned from the set.