Seen and Heard Opera
Review
Maazel, 1984 (world
premiere): Soloists, orchestra and chorus of Royal Opera House,
Lorin Maazel (conductor), ROH, Covent Garden, 6 May 2005 (MB)
Orwell’s dystopian novel opens in Robert Lepage’s
staging of Lorin Maazel’s new opera with the clock tower
of Big Ben striking thirteen; the opera ends with the same image,
and throughout the work’s 150 minutes running time it often
feels as if time has stood still. Given Lepage’s own history,
as an award-winning filmmaker, it seemed almost inevitable that
the Royal Opera House’s staging would lean heavily towards
cinema, and there are echoes to filmed versions by Rudolf Cartier
(1954), Michael Anderson (1956) and Michael Radford (1984) rippling
through it (with more than a nod to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil).
Having Jeremy Irons supply the voice over for Big Brother, recounting
a sterile shopping list of statistics, more statistics and damned
lies, documentary footage relayed on screens and an unambivalent
use of videography blurs the distinction between what opera should
be and what opera becomes in this confused and disappointing production.
With so many distractions on hand (from Piccadilly Circus type
message hoards, to eyes staring out at you) opera rarely gets
a look in.
The capital of Airstrip 1 in Orwell’s novel is London and
whilst there is – correctly – not a single hint of
the utopian world Oceania would like to believe is the truth,
much that could have been done with this production isn’t
touched on. Rooted in almost the time the book was written, there
is a literalism to the set designs. And yet, London today is probably
the single most watched city in the world; a more corrosive look
at how Nineteen Eighty Four is of our time might have
made for sustainable dramatic tension, rather than the stifling
atmosphere that Lepage replicates from cinema with its superficially
impressive contour of colours and lighting based around a muted
dilapidation of oppression and censorship. There is a 1940s post-war
squalor to Carl Fillion’s sets, whether it be in the form
of a Charrington’s pub, an empty bedroom or even within
the semi-opulence of O’Brien’s room itself. Darkness,
piss-soaked walls, rubble littering the streets and the scattered
emblems of the past – such as a discarded church bell, against
which Julia first seduces Winston – act only as time-specific
devices; yet, get to Room 101 itself, and we are in a madhouse
of sanitary white and apocalyptic instruments of torture. Orwell’s
novel was so ahead of its time that little attempt has been made
in this production to tell the story other than it is. And it
fails because of that.
That is not to say, however, that there are not flickers of genius
here and there, almost all of them reserved for the final act.
How far cinematography is interlacing with the traditional staging
of opera productions could be witnessed in Winston’s hallucinatory
rantings about Julia: she appears as a girl dancing through meadows
on the vast background screen (an image startlingly reminiscent
of the recent Gotterdämmerung at ENO of Siegfried’s
Rhine Journey) and similarly well done was Winston’s torture
with rats, here seen as a series of rat-like shadows crawling
over the walls and floor of his padded cell. These were startling
images, evocative even. Winston’s brainwashing is shown
in close up shards of agonized facial expressions on a big screen
bringing us closer to his torture and pain than might otherwise
be the case. But they are isolated inventions within a largely
pluralistic and conservative staging.
This extends to Lorin Maazel’s score, too. Perhaps because
he is principally a conductor, the music is a patchwork of indistinct
styles thieved from here and there with little attempt made to
give them a uniformity of voice. There are moments – the
opening, for example, and Winston’s torture – where
the orchestral writing moves up a notch but Maazel’s big
failure is to do anything with these innovations, and climaxes
fizzle out like smouldering embers. There are some sublime moments
during Act II where Maazel accords a theme to a specific instrument
– a violin solo, a cello solo, or a percussion solo –
and these give the music an edginess that rises above the swamp
of pastiche, but the impression is of a composer who does not
have a wide enough musical concept to construct long-lasting drama.
Strauss (echoes of both Rosenkavalier and Elektra),
Britten, Berg, Bernstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein, sit besides
Maazel’s own brand of eclecticism. Varese gets a look in
with wailing air-raid sirens meshing with the music, sometimes
to eerie effect. He does, however, skilfully write for the voice
(although an over emphasis on making the libretto rhyme becomes
grating), but the lack of any memorable arias makes it a rather
pointless exercise, and rather difficult for a critic to write
about it in any detail.
Despite quite notable differences between what the surtitles were
showing and what the singer’s were phrasing (at one stage
Simon Keenlyside reversed the order of the lines he was singing)
the Royal Opera has assembled a cast which is world-class. Keenlyside’s
Winston dominates the opera, and he sings both beautifully and
with a profound sense of knowingness. He is beguiling to watch,
as consummate an actor as he is a singer. Yet, straight-jacketed
by a lack of direction even Keenlyside has problems holding the
attention. His ‘love’ scenes with Julia are deliberately
uneroticised, stolen moments that end in a Brief Encounter
type conclusion. Nancy Gustafson’s Julia is again beautifully
sung, but she has too little to do. Richard Margison’s O’Brien
is malevolent, but little else. Diana Damrau, in two roles as
the Gym Instructress and the Drunken Woman, gives quite wonderful
support, but Lawrence Brownlee’s Syme – brilliantly
narrating in Newspeak – was both light of voice and tended
to use his Rossinian strengths to too little effect.
The problem with this new opera is that it is rarely opera at
all and in the opera house it works against every construct of
what an opera should do. Its trickery is to seduce the eyes rather
than the ears; in that sense, 1984 fails lamentably as opera.
Marc Bridle
1984 will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday 25th May at
7pm and will be broadcast on BBC 4 at a date still to be
confirmed.
1984 by Lorin Maazel The Royal Opera House 04 / 2005
Libretto: J D McClatchy and Thomas Meehan based on the George
Orwell novel '1984'
Conductor: Lorin Maazel
Director: Robert Lepage
Set Designs: Carl Fillion
Costume Designs: Yasmina Giguère
Lighting: Michel Beaulieu
Choreography: Sylvain Émard
Photographs © Bill Cooper
