Parsifal eludes me (I can't get to the RFH in time to grovel for returns,
or even for the 5.30 start), so I've been schlepping to the outer darkness
for music theatre marginalia.

Battersea Arts Centre has an opera season every September. Last year's
included a double bill of The coffee cantata and Trouble in Tahiti. The
current season is called A sharp intake of music, and consists of chamber
productions by very small subsidised groups.

Postcards from Andalusia, a work in progress by Paul Weir, consisted of
scenes from Lorca's plays set to music in Spanish dance forms which didn't
do anything for the English words, and performed by a group of young women
who couldn't in general sing. Still, the selected texts made a coherent
group, focussing on the rather predictable themes of desire and
childlessness.

Songs of love and desire (Post Operative Productions, a group that
presumably had to think of a name quickly) sounds similar, but was a lot
more interesting. Also work in progress, it consisted of staged versions of
four madrigals by Monteverdi, as part of a project to produce the whole of
book 4. Five singers in evening dress acted out the themes and interactions
as they sang, while an actress in a red renaissance-looking dress wandered
around looking pensive. Two madrigals were sung in Italian and two in
English.

There was courtly dancing for the madrigal about the stars reminding the
singer of his beloved, and a nuts-in-may battle between boys and girls over
the sheet music for the one about the little birds with reciprocated
passion. None of the singers sounded like renaissance or baroque
specialists, but they did pretty well.

The most interesting thing was also the most irritating. The singers were
on a platform in the middle of the studio; the audience sat on chairs with
their backs to the platform and watched in a mirror at eye-level on the
wall. The wall had bends and corners, and the kaleidoscopic effect was
often beautiful, and reminiscent of the fragmented nature of the music. But
they'd planned it for someone several inches taller than me, and it's
extremely annoying having people singing behind your back. The gimmick
nearly paid off in the end, though. They ended as they had begun with Ah,
dolente partita, gradually moving out of the studio and singing from
further and further away, leaving the audience in nearly complete darkness
(with only the Exit signs) as the music faded from somewhere indeterminate.

Shockheaded Peter at the Lyric, Hammersmith, calls itself a junk opera, and
it's certainly something else. Also part of a season of music theatre, it's
a collaboration between two (again) small, subsidised arts groups: Cultural
Industry, a theatre group, and Tiger Lily, a cabaret-style trio, whose
singer Martyn Jaques sings in an amazing falsetto (he says he's a
castrato). More like Ute Lemper than David Daniels or Ira Siff, but worth
hearing and very funny and theatrical.

Based on Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffmann, this production brought out
the humour and scariness of the original spectacularly well using the
oldest of old technology, stage flats and puppets. The set was a room with
four doors in trompe l'oeil perspective (similar to the Opera North/ENO
Falstaff set), and other scenery (furniture, trees, buildings) was pushed
in through the doors or up through the floors, as were various scary things
like flames and the eponymous Peter's long fingernails. Harriet (who played
with matches) burned to death before our very eyes very effectively by
slowly lifting her full skirt over her head to show a mass of
flame-coloured petticoats.

There was a master of ceremonies, or ringmaster, who was permanently
falling to bits and just about holding on. In a virtuoso performance,
Julian Bleach managed to be both endearing and disturbing from the moment
he said "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls". He guided us in pretentious
moralizing doggerel through the story of the affluent couple who
desperately want a baby, but can't stand the sight of him when he arrives
and put him in a hole in the floor. The child's hair and fingernails emerge
into their lovely home, and the parents go mad and become fairground
freaks. The mother was Tamzin Griffin, best known as the Funny Lady on the
Teletubbies. Allegedly. The father, Anthony Cairns, was almost as twisted
as the MC.

The other stories were done as carabet numbers in a range of styles by
Tiger Lily, with various dramatizations. The man with the gun, done with
puppets, was splendid. Every single one ends up with somebody dead, and
there was a running wind up in the songs about when the word "dead" or
"died" would come. Hoffman's original was a windup up, of course, a
reductio ad absurdum of conventional morality stories, doing for children's
(and adults') most basic physical fears what the Alice stories did for more
mature anxieties about civilization and personal identity. There was a bit
of Alice here -- the perspective set made people look too big at time,  --
but also more than a touch of ETA Hoffmann, a world where desire leads
inevitably to violent loss and people fall to bits or have parts removed on
a regular basis.

Well worth the ride on the Hammersmith and City line. Probably too scary
and disturbing for small children, but the Roald Dahl cohort might well
love it.