Lammermoor, the Inside Story
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Lucia di Lammermoor, one of Donizetti’s most famous operas, is ultimately based on a ‘true’ story. Written in 1835, the libretto was inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel The Bride of Lammermuir. This in turn is based on an orally-recounted story of two Scottish families, in which a daughter, Lucy, was embroiled in a feud between the Whigs and the Royalists and married off against her will to an ally of their family. Descending into insanity as a result of a complete lack of personal choice, and shameless deployment by men for political ends, she was discovered in a corner with blood all over her nightclothes, while the unwanted husband lay stabbed and bleeding on the bed.
Beren Fidan as Lucia and Jack Dolan as Edgardo
The opera story takes this as a starting point but is perhaps more basic, and simultaneously more eternal. The girl who, controlled by male politics, kills herself or dies for love is one of the more enduring tropes in literary history. Dido, Juliet, Ophelia, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Rochester’s first wife Bertha Mason (in Jane Eyre) going mad in the attic, Maria in West Side Story – dozens more. None of these heroines had agency, and in fiction represent a human condition that women have struggled against for at least the last couple of centuries: the idea that because men are physically stronger they can control the world, and should manipulate ‘their’ women. That struggle isn’t, unfortunately, yet over.
CONTINUING RELEVANCE
So the continuing popularity of this opera is not only based on its musical brilliance, but on its continuing social relevance. Suicide rates in the UK now stand at their highest for 25 years, and there has been recent national discussion of cyberbullying: over 200 UK schoolchildren die by suicide every year, partly because bullying, and the resulting sense of helplessness, is no longer confined to school hours.
The organisers at the mental health charity Soundcastle are well aware of this. Based in Hastings, but operating all around the South East, Soundcastle’s various sections specialise in creative and collaborative music-making for positive mental health. It all sounds quite obvious – of course music-making is important for children and grown-ups. Every school, primary and secondary, used to have a music teacher. Music and Art now seem to be discretionary subjects, to be addressed incidentally after children have been steeped in science and tech – almost regarded by successive Education ministers as a bit of flummery or a relief from ‘real’ learning. Considering the countless studies proving the benefits of music and art as part of a well-rounded education, and for residents in psychiatric institutions, it’s all extremely sad and disturbing.
So the association of Barefoot Opera with the Soundcastle charity, for this season, is important, timely, and appropriate. Barefoot Opera is a company of professional singers, and their productions, even with the comparatively small funds they are able to raise, are exceptional.
Designer Fenna De Jonge and Director Rosie Kat haveworked to lay the emphasis on Lucia’s angst, which could be that of any present-day teenage girl. Though the music is the original, the operatic presentation has been modified to focus on Lucia’s situation and the factors which strongly affect her mental health: the overbearing father, the presence and then absence of the mother, the political manoeuvring of the family, the general lack of agency which is such a crucial factor – Charlotte Perkins recognised this over a hundred years ago in The Yellow Wallpaper, Sylvia Plath more recently in The Bell Jar. People who are perhaps watching opera for the first time (and Barefoot positively encourages new audiences) will identify with the plight of the heroine.
THE PERFORMANCE
It’s a lovely church, St John’s. The pulpit and the choir stalls are painted in delicate shades of Annie Sloan chalk paint; the inside walls, stairways, and high arches are a lovely pale stone. It has itself an extraordinary history (fully documented on Wikipedia) of building and rebuilding, a determined flattening, reforming, rejuvenation. The history of Lucia therefore, staged as it was at the altar end of the church, is in ironic contrast to this history of resilience.
For this is not the traditional opera of spectacle. If necessity is the mother of invention, Barefoot Opera turns necessity into an art form. In the simplest of settings, carefully designed to bear maximum relation to the action, nine first-class musicians and a very small stage direction team produced something magnificent. While the surrounding church acted as a general substitute for the normal elaborate gothic castle backdrop, for the performers, a round platform served as an outdoor meeting place, a graveyard and part of the family’s ancestral home. Four multi-instrumentalists and singers acted as both orchestra and cast, the accordion (the ‘poor man’s orchestra’) making up for a great deal of the normal orchestral requirements. A wonderful, pliable neon-lit strip served first as illumination on the circular platform, but subsequently as a symbol – thrown down in anger, clutched lovingly between a pair, hopelessly tangled and marred in confusion and despair.
Enrico (Philip Smith), scheming
Lucia sees her own wedding celebrations through a drug-fuelled haze. Clearly the pills she has been given (drugs and booze play a central part in this production) are the mind-enhancing sort. In a daring adaptation of the wedding scene, the protagonists are viewed through her eyes, encircling her in inappropriate robes, heads garlanded with flowers. She finds the whole thing ghoulishly funny and (attention all you ex-acid trippers) is occasionally diverted by the pattern on her shoe, or the hairs on her arm. The technique could have descended into bathos, but the abiding power of Donizetti’s music, careful stage direction, and wonderful singing made it instead rather enchanting, a bit of a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
TRANSCENDENT VOICES
If all this sounds too much like street theatre, think again. The lack of spectacle puts uncharacteristic pressure on the singers, with a corresponding requirement of effort. And the particular emphasis of this production, honing in on Lucia’s conflicted emotional state, means that Beren Fidan, who sang the role, is centre stage almost all the time.
She is, though, by any standard, extraordinary. Two years out of the National Opera Studio, she has already won a raft of prizes for star coloratura performances all over the UK and Europe. Last year she was wonderful in La Traviata; this year she seems to have extended her vocal power, range, and ability even further; her command of the role was compelling. The celebrated ‘mad scene’ (her tragic decline after stabbing her husband) is usually known as a vehicle for a bel canto soprano to demonstrate her ability; Fidan’s soprano range is exceptional, her voice incredible, and her ability to place complex, demanding decorative melodic additions to the score, yet make it all look natural and easy, is something special.
So much focus on the central role did not detract from the musical accomplishments of the rest of the cast. Jack Dolan’s confused, angered, ultimately tragic Edgardo was a delight. Musical director Michael Panter not only played and conducted from the keyboard throughout, he also sang in the necessary ‘choral’ scenes (written for 40, adapted for seven). Lucy Mulgan underpinned the whole musical score on the stand-up bass. The accordion player, Alistair Sutherland, doubled (in a dog collar) as an obsequious and fickle Raimondo; Lydia Kenny played soprano and tenor saxophones but also became the ghost of Lucia’s mother. Jack Dolan made an excellent Edgardo (Lucia’s forbidden love), and Philip Smith, as Enrico, controlled his hapless sister with a powerful baritone matched with an insidious and calculating smile. His wealthy ally, Arturo, is married off to Lucia and was sung by Eamonn Walsh recognising that he was almost equally under Enrico’s control. Alisa the maid, though only singing solo in one scene, is on stage, acting and expressive almost all the time and integral to the action. Mezzo-soprano Deirdre Arratoon managed this part with aplomb.
So forget spectacle, elaborate scenery, choral casts of hundreds, expensive period costumes. A production like this enables the audience to appreciate the bare bones of an opera – not for nothing is Jenny Miller’s company called Barefoot. The church was packed; if you missed it this time or at the Arcola in London, you can see it back here at St John’s on 4 October, or in between on a tour of the South East. And if you think you don’t like opera, even better – you can’t fail to be converted.
More tickets at barefootopera.com/shop Concerts: Arcola 9-13 September, 7.30 pm, Glassbox, Gillingham 18 Sept; Sarah Thorne, Broadstairs 21 Sept; Ropetackle, Shoreham 23 Sept; Creative Centre, Rye 25 Sept; St Michael’s, Brighton 27 Sept; Tower, Folkestone 1 Oct; St John the Evangelist, Hastings 4 Oct. Full details and cast at arcolatheatre.com/whats-on/lucia-di-lammermoor
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