The Flying Dutchman, Opera North: making Wagner relevant – with mixed results
Opera North has got it right. At this time of acute uncertainty for the UK’s opera companies, it welcomes its audiences both old and new with confidence. The company has struck a fine balance between innovation and risk, paring down production costs (its Green season used recycled sets), while still exploring little-known works such as the recent revival of Kurt Weill’s Love Life. It has also brought a fresh perspective to bear on the classical repertory, notably in its award-winning intermingling of Monteverdi’s Orfeo with South Asian music and dance in Orpheus. As a result it has managed to avoid some of the worst of the current funding problems, and although it must make cuts, it is showing imaginative ways to invest and finding viable new ways forward for the art-form.
Of course, not all experimentation works: here was a bold and some might say foolhardy undertaking to map the stories of contemporary refugees onto Wagner’s tale of the Flying Dutchman, who is doomed to travel the seas, finding land only every seven years. In Annabel Arden’s new production, the testimony of those real-life travellers was inserted with a few sentences of their bitter experiences spoken before each act.
That worked sensitively in giving the timeless story a contemporary jolt, but Arden with her set and video designer Joanna Parker went further. They transforming the port where the Dutchman seeks refuge into a Home Office of laughing bureaucrats, with computer charts of refugee numbers - a conceit that did not quite sustain itself through to the manic partying of the last act, presumably intended as a night in the office before the days of working from home.
Luckily, there was tremendous support from the magnificent chorus and orchestra, to whom Wagner assigns a leading role in the drama. Indeed the constant rumbling video of the sea was rather less threatening than the music of the storm, unleashed by conductor Garry Walker and his orchestra (excellent horns), while the chorus under Anthony Kraus packed a huge punch throughout, sustaining this drama with its odd mix of set-piece arias and large-scale scenes.
Unfortunately, Layla Claire, making her house debut as Senta, was unable to sing because she was unwell. She did, however, act her role vividly, with piercing eyes and twisting emotions, while Mari Wyn Williams sang the part impressively from the corner of the stage. This Senta is besotted by the concept of the Dutchman from the moment she dons a lookalike hat and is drawn inexorably into his orbit. Though this lumbering and bedraggled Dutchman gave evidence of years at sea, and was a powerful presence, the voice of the much-admired Robert Hayward was ill-focused and too frequently uncertain in pitch.
Instead it was left to Edgaras Montvidas, combining the roles of Senta’s betrothed Erik and the Steersman of the ship, to give a superbly cutting account of those two parts, especially in the third act where Erik’s denunciation of Senta rang with passion. Clive Bayley as Senta’s father Daland, in this incarnation the head of the Home Office, managed the shift from harassed official to tormented father, while there was a fine cameo performance from Molly Barker as his assistant Mary.
In the end we were left with the tumult of Wagner’s raw, youthful score, and the production’s baffling end for Senta, as she surrounded herself with random refugee belongings, and disappeared. There is a lot to ponder in this aptly disconcerting take on a masterpiece.
Touring to March 28; operanorth.co.uk