The Stage

Intolerance/Golden Years

Published Friday 13 August 2010 at 11:33 by Edward Bhesania

Another summer, another refreshing Tete a Tete: The Opera Festival at the Riverside Studios, offering an ‘anything goes’ smorgasbord of contemporary music theatre. A week into the festival comes Intolerance, a collaboration between Northern Irish musical dramatist Conor Mitchell and playwright Mark Ravenhill (of Shopping & Fucking fame, in his first operatic project). Taking its title and text from one of the Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat plays, the monologue features soprano Rebecca Caine as the housewife Helen who suffers from a mysterious gut problem. Yoga practice, probiotic yogurt ingestion and avoiding caffeine seem to offer some relief (all of which point to a self-absorbed, middle-class existence), but there is a hidden intolerance demonstrated by her anti-Semitic outbursts. The episodic nature of the text makes for a satisfying musical-dramatic framework, and Mitchell handles his six-piece ensemble with evident craft - though in performance, they occasionally drown out Caine’s highly intelligent yet natural performance. Her voice draws lyricism out of sometimes anti-lyrical (but always appealing) lines, and is rich in tonal shading.

In Jordan Hunt and JohnJoseph Bibby’s straightforwardly comic Golden Years, aging soprano Lavinia Greengarden - effectively Hyacinth Bouquet cast as a parochial opera starlet - has a violent intolerance of pre-show bonbons, causing her apparently to pop her clogs just before a crucial performance for the local light opera society in the presence of the local arts-funding tsarina. At the last minute, Lavinia’s faithful friend Toots Mulholland is thrust into the limelight, later joined in a triumphant duo as Lavinia recovers. Jordan Hunt sets the quick-fire text with skill, taking Britten as his benchmark. While in some ways unambitious, the piece is well executed and genuinely, if lightly, entertaining.