Commissioned by Almeida Opera, composed by Deirdre Gribben, text by Sharman
MacDonald

Young girls     Gemma Farrell, Charlotte Mackenzie,
                Emilia Pountney, Sarah Shanson
Maureen         Nuala Willis
Craig           Daniel Norman
Linda           Buddug Verona James
Maggie/Edith    Sally Harrison
David           Stephen Brown
Ellen           Helen Williams
Maeve           Amanda Boyd
John            Damian Thatney
Marguerite      Louise Mott
James           Jonathan Peter Kenny

Conductor       David Parry
Director        Hettie MacDonald
Design          Robin Don

The Almeida Ensemble

Hey Persephone could be called Doreen, a Glasgow, female equivalent of
Greek. Like Turnage's opera, it retells an archetypal myth, the story of
Demeter and Persephone, in the language and environment of a modern city.
But it is both more pessimistic and more humane.

Sharman MacDonald's libretto shows how the cycle of romance and despair
repeats itself within patriarchy, as Maeve (named for the Celtic queen of
the faries, who lives underground like Persephone) runs off with the
traveller John, embracing the night to escape her mother Ellen's neat and
lonely world, only (we see but she doesn't) to reproduce Ellen's romance
with Maeve's father James, a nasty wee man who can still bully John into
letting Maeve return home in the autumn. In the background, three
hard-bitten auld bags comment cynically and four young girls sing
playground rhymes that ritualise what is going on, often cruelly. Maeve's
friend Marguerite, who also fancies John, watches furious with envy as he
seduces Maeve, then makes do with David, the son of one of the auld bags,
realising that she could have a real life (be an MP, for example) if she
weren't so obsessed with sex. David's brain-damaged twin Craig wanders
about getting in the way, playing with a cheque-book that mirrors Ellen's
conventional obsession with money. His mother's love for him is the only
unconditional love in the work, which begins and ends with her weary
expression of it.

The choices for the women are grim: Ellen is smart and hard-working, but
she loses her daughter and any illusions she might have had about her ex;
Maeve still has her illusions, but no more; and the other women have only
their cynicism and humour. But that, and especially Marguerite's comically
cheerful randiness, is better than being stuck in love with the worthless
James and John.

Both the language and the music evoke wonderfully the small moments of
mystery and delight among the miseries of urban life. I didn't hear much
(words or accents) that really sounded Glasgewegian, but the dialogue was
alwasy fast and funny, and often very rude. Gribben's music consisted
mainly of atmospheric instrumental effects (some amplified) and very brief
snatches of tunes, with rather jagged vocal lines that didn't really fit
with the dialect but certainly didn't stop us hearing it. But at key
points, she used haunting longer fragments of Irish-sounding melody,
particularly in Maeve's near-aria welcoming the darkness at the end of act
1, which was accompanied only by the minutest harmonics on (I think) a
violin.

The performances generally brought out the richness and emotion of the
work. Louise Mott was outstanding (again) and very funny but also quite
endearinlgy hard-nosed as Marguerite.  Nuala Willis, Buddug Verona James
and Sally Harrison were suitably drunken as the three older women, and
Willis was very moving as Maureen, Craig's mother. Amanda Boyd looked very
young, and sounded very cute as Maeve.

Jonathan Peter Kenny was sinister and unpleasant as James. It was an
interesting idea to cast a counter-tenor as the nasty. I think it came off,
because the slightly strange timbre makes him as alien as John the
traveller. Unfortunately, it also meant that there were three high voices
in an argument at several points, and Kenny's voice isn't striking enough
to differentiate it, or even to be heard at times over two sopranos. He
seemed much more at home in a modern idiom than he was in OTC's Flavio a
few years ago. Maybe he simply needs detailed direction, which Hettie
MacDonald certainly provided.

The single set was a court in the middle of a tenement, coloured a rather
improbable and orange with lighting. A tree in the middle served as the
wilderness to which Maeve and John fled. The older women and young girls
popped out of the windows from time to time to comment.

In spite of its resemblance, I'm not sure how to compare this with Greek,
which has turned out to be a near-classic. The humour of Hey, Persephone!
gets a lot closer to painful reality (rather than the comic evasions of
reality in London bravado), and the music seems to evoke the texture of
life more closely. But that's probably a good thing. I think it will stick
around.