According to the website:
"**** Critic's Choice - Britten's haunting masterpiece's small-scale orchestration and obsession with the unseen fits OperaupClose like a glove." - Time Out
"**** A tightly-controlled and brilliantly thought-through concept that allows us to see and hear a great work in a totally new light... while ratcheting up the tension to an almost unbearable degree...." - Whatsonstage
What a lot of self-congratulatory, self-indulgent toss.
"Much in this modern-dress production works well" says the Guardian; unfortunately much more does not.
So we want to take opera into the 21st century and make it rough and raw and gritty and all that shit which is great; we do NOT do that simply by shoving it into a room over a pub and leaving it to get on with itself. The more intimate, the more pared down opera becomes, the more significant every individual aspect of it becomes; lighting, set, costume, acting...everything has to be overtly and intently aiding the piece and expressing an intent. It is not enough to sing nicely and fill in the rest as an afterthought.
"Signe Beckmann's elegantly plain white space is transformed by Richard Bleasdale's video projections into fields, marshes and lakes, without ever losing the eerieness of a haunted house and, under Edward Dick's claustrophobic direction, the confinement of a prison cell..." - broadwayworld.com
Utter balls. The "plain white space" was exactly what it said on the tin (and I find no fault with that - it could have worked wonderfully), but Richard bloody Bleasdale's incessant bloody projections were closer to GCSE art project than "the eerieness of a haunted house", and as for Edward Dick's "claustrophobic direction"... well, look at him. Look at smug edward Dick there, living up to his name. Perhaps fifty years ago it would have been edgy and inspired but now it's just fucking drama school drivel - claustrophobic? It felt as if every non musical aspect of the production was working actively to AVOID building any tension or fear or fucking claustrophobia. The whole thing was so lazy and bloated and SAFE.
This is the first of two fundamental flaws in OperaUpClose's turn of the Screw - that it lacked basic fucking stagecraft. The inconsistency in costume, set and props was disgraceful. Some characters (the children, the maid) changed clothes depending on the day, whilst the Governess kept hers the same throughout; some outfits are contemporary, some are 50's (with no justifiable reason for the distinction that I could see); none serve any overall aesthetic and few were appropriate to character.
Props: again, completely inconsistent. Some vital props (the Governess' letter, the girl's cats cradle) were mimed (poorly - if you want to mime THEN LEARN HOW TO FUCKING MIME YOU LAZY GIT DON'T JUST WAVE YOUR HANDS AROUND MAKE SOME KIND OF AN EFFORT FOR FUCKS SAKE), whilst other complete irrelevancies (a can of coke or a bag of marshmallows) were garishly and pointlessly apparent. If the inconsistencies were intentional then sorry Dicky, swing and a miss here - unfortunately I doubt they were. My money's on either laziness or incompetence on the part of the director; I'm not sure which would be more despicable.
If you're going to do a GOTHIC HORROR in MODERN DRESS then you really need to know why and how you're doing that, and not just assume that buying a few Care Bear t-shirts and baby pink hoodies will suffice. If we're setting it in the here and now them why the fuck are they all messing about with letters when a phone call would have fixed everything? Where's the electricity? Why the FUCK, in the scene where he needs it does Miles have his candle (again, how many little boys today use candles at night instead of switching on the light?), but later when searching for Flora Mrs fucking Grose has an ELECTRIC BLOODY TORCH. FUCKING LAZY.
That said, the staging of some scenes (the opening of Act 2, with it's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" bitterness) had plenty going for it, and the framing device Dick's employed is really quite lovely. Musical direction and performance from David Eaton is uniformly wonderful.
Other performances were a mixed bag, and too often you found people saving their "acting" for the bits when they weren't singing.
Eleanor Burke as Flora was exceptional, and I couldn't praise her enough; she's a girl to watch very closely over the next decade, and was by some measure the most talented one on stage. Catrine Kirkman too, as Miss Jessel, stood out as fantastically unhinged and terrifying - really excellent work. Both of these performers combined the vocal, the physical and the emotional in their characters and did so consistently and with great success.
Samuel Woof as Miles was really very good too, with a surprising maturity - though I got no real sense of the connection between him and the Governess - and David Menezes as Peter Quint (though fine) might have been better had he not been transformed into an awkwardly effeminate James Dean (in the brief part of the prologue Menezes excelled)(that's not an insult).
Katie Bird as The Governess was a fine singer, but that's about it. Her performance lacked any depth, colour or truth, and what should have been drowning in confusion, paranoia, self-doubt and insanity became a case of mild constipation. She was bypassed only by Mrs Grosse (who will not be named and shamed because I lost my programme), who seemed more interested in her fucking props than her performance, was constantly hiding her face, and produced little more than a musical version of that annoying one off Eastenders. Most painful of all is that these last two had such glimpses of skill and talent and vulnerability and truth, which were all too quickly tossed aside in favour of self-indulgence and ego.
Both had big problems with diction, but aside from that are satisfactory classical singers. Opera should be more than that.
The second half was far stronger than the first, and all performances warmed up as the piece progressed, but really; what was the director doing throughout the rehearsal period? Leaving everyone to just get on with it? The sheer mass of incongruity, inconsistency and miscommunication shows no trace of any guiding hand, no trace of consideration and no trace of a fucking director.
In every way that this production failed, however, the La Boheme I saw from Vignette Productions a couple of nights later succeeded. It was stark, horrific, new, beautifully performed, beautifully sung, beautifully acted, beautifully expressed and beautifully hideous. It was everything that opera should be, can be and is; everything that opera needs to start reminding itself of should it wish to progress. The only reason, in fact, that I'm not giving that extraordinary interpretation a full and raving write up instead of this pile of dross is that as far as I know there are no more UK dates, which is frankly a crime when this Screw goes on for at least another month. If you want that to change then go and give them money. NOW.
The fundamental flaw of this OperaUpClose production, when all is said and done, is that it was about as scary and as edgy as a satsuma. It was lazy, cliched, drama school self-indulgence with minimal emotional truth and minimal emotional vulnerability. and it really wasn't very scary.
