WHEN, a few seasons ago, Sir Harrison Birtwistle's opera The
Last Supper was staged at Glyndebourne, one of the arresting
features was a multi-deck set that enabled events in Christ's life
to be unfolded in a graphic, novel way. The effect was not unlike a
traditional nativity scene, or a Victorian paschal church mural
brought to life.
Glyndebourne recently returned to the idea with a three-level
rear-stage set, designed by Ed Devlin and Bronia Housman, which
adds terrific impact to its latest community undertaking. These
experiments plant amateur performers from a wide locality (and
beyond) in a punchy staging alongside professional leads of
sometimes awesome power and virtuosity.
The attractive idea behind Imago, by the (here)
essentially Minimalist composer Orlando Gough, whose music, if
occasionally over-loud early on, was vividly brought to life last
month by the conductor Nicholas Collon and his Aurora Orchestra, is
that a medic and boffin (the tenor Daniel Norman, actually an
occupational therapist) has designed a device by which his
patients, mostly old and ill, can reach back and reconstruct or
reinvent their past lives in their imagination.
This, he hopes, will bring some respite to their anguish, act as
a salve, and offer hope within their cramped hospital-ward
existence.
The morality and humanity of the work shone through here in
Susannah Waters's beautifully controlled production. It presents
the community groups - their singing, often energised and vividly
syncopated, is first rate - in startling blockings and imaginative
wheelings.
Most haunting are the patients themselves, incarcerated in their
nine honeycomb cells like a set of Fra Angelicos in Florence, sad
and seemingly abandoned; except that a strange piece of black
headgear with a lit turquoise strip indicates that they are
communicating - with their own past, whether real or imagined.
It is a humane idea, and proves remarkably apt for opera. Pick
of a bracing team of performers were soprano Jean Rigby
(Elizabeth), a wilful old lady whose life is at the centre of it
all (rather like the elderly Rose in Titanic); Joanna
Songi as her sparky young alter ego; and two animated boys (James
Brock and Flint Pascoe-Easterby), the medic's sons, plugged into
the revolutionary online process, each maturing as a result.
Most essential of all was the video designer Finn Ross, who
engineered the startling, electronically charged cyber-atmosphere
for the whole startling sequence. Glyndebourne has excelled in
community work for some years; this undertaking was well up to its
highest standards.
Roderic Dunnett