Dr Ox's Experiment, by Gavin Bryars, libretto by Blake Morrison, based on the story by Jules Verne. (First production, postponed from last season.) Dr Ox Bonaventura Bottone Ygene Riccardo Simonetti Ordibeck Antony Rich Mrs Ordibeck Fiona Hebenton Van Tricasse Nicholas Folwell Mrs Van Tricasse Susanna Tudor-Thomas Passauf Dean Robinson Mrs Passauf Ingrid Baier Nicklausse Mark Richardson Mrs Nicklasse Judith Douglas Suzel Valdine Anderson Frantz David James Suzanne Anna-Clare Monk Fritz Ryland Angel Aunt Hermance Della Jones Valentine Susan Parry Raoul John Hudson Conductor James Holmes Director Atom Egoyam Quiquendone (possibly to be pronounced "chicken dung", according to Morrison) is a small, sedate town in Flanders where everything moves very slowly and nothing changes. Couples pass each other the marmelade and talk about the weather; the council agrees to make no decisions yet; the lovers are five years into a ten-year engagement. Dr Ox, a monomaniacal scientist with a conscience stricken sidekick Ygene, introduces to the town a gas which makes everyone move faster, causing an outbreak of hedonism on the one hand and political radicalism on the other. The councillors start a war (over an incident that happened seven hundred years ago, about the time of the battle of Kosovo) and are about to get everybody killed when there is an explosion and the gas is dispersed. Aunt Hermance says that everything is back to normal, the young woman Suzel thinks not. The reviewers in the papers have been lukewarm at best about Dr Ox's experiment. Although I enjoyed it, I can see why. Bryars' music, a sort of romantic minimalism, while attractive and enjoyable, doesn't deliver drama so much as a static dialectic of tempos and textures. The humour and mania of effects of the gas are completely missing. There are passages in faster tempos, but only by contrast. Other contrasts are more effective, though. For example, the use of countertenors for the young men gived the young couples a distinct timbre that made them a likely source of disruption. My other big grump about Bryars' music is that it doesn't set Morrison's often amusing words. For example, I could hear the words of Ox's scientific flim-flam clearly: Let's magnetize the manganese with magnified magenta And amalgamate the acetates with anastigmatic lenses Then oxidate the oxalate with an oxy-acetyline blowpipe... But I couldn't hear anything like this in the music he was singing. There are some good ideas, though. Ox releases the gas during a performance of Les Hugenots, and there is a poignant interplay of the audience losing their inhibitions in a way which we can see will lead to violence, and Valentine and Raoul agonising over the St Bartholemew's day massacre. Having this at the temporal centre of the work makes the opera non-trivial, and the interaction of quotations from Mayerbeer and Bryars' own more abstract music moves things on powerfully. And then there's the general point about the power of music, and music drama in particular, to move people. Similarly, the big issue about whether scientists should impose "progress" on people regardless of whether they want it is a live one, and Verne's explosion, presumably based on the Stoic ecpyrosis, is even more resonant after the atom bomb. (I'm amazed how fast the potency of nuclear anihilation as a theme has faded, though Bryars must have had it in mind when he started work in 1988.) Ox and Ygene, musically distinct from the townspeople both by being higher men's voices and by their more conversational and melodic music, had something like a dramatic dialogue. And the long-engaged couple, sitting by the river, him fishing and her sewing, had a lovely musical slow-burn. Atom Egoyan's production was clever and economical, and very effective in the slow sections. The outbursts could only be as effective as the music. Dr Ox's laboratory was downstage, in front of a slightly misty white scrim that represented the gas when it was there. He watched events through the prompt box, as it were, and had a few control panels and some other equipment (including a tea service) that came out of holes in the floor. The town first appeared as a geological-looking structure which turned out to be made up of the townspeople in chunky quilted white mediaeval costumes. Using three ladders, and holding candles with backdrop of stars, they slowly formed different baroque lumps, ending up as a tidy audience at the opera before the fighting broke out with the gas. The liberated town had a lot of wires and churns churning themselves, and the townspeople lost some of their clothes and carried long handled spoons. And nothing changed from that after the explosion, in spite of the claims that everything was back to normal. This an ensemble piece, and the townspeople were a fine ensemble. Bonaventura Bottone had a demonic edge as Dr Ox, and Riccardo Simonetti sounded very good as Ygene, as well as looking suitably decent. He also seemed quite at ease being raised and lowered on wires, amusingly "controlled" by Dr Ox via a rope going into the prompt box. The Coliseum wasn't quite sold out, but it was pretty full on a suffocatingly hot night, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. This was a sensible choice as a new commission in that it might well turn out to be popular rather than critically well regarded, like Akhenaten. Dr Ox isn't earth shattering as a new work, but with its Star-Trek like big theme and accessible music it might be a sleeper, or even a word-of-mouth success. I seem to have gone on too long. Gimme some of that gas.