The Decision review

Under its visionary founding artistic director, the late Graham Vick, Birmingham Opera Company forged a reputation for covering an exciting range of repertoire, in individually selected locations, while drawing in amateur performers from the area. It’s proof that opera doesn’t need a large management team, or even an opera house.

The performance space for the company’s latest production – a Lehrstück, or ’lesson play’, by Bertolt Brecht to which Hanns Eisler added songs, choruses and recitatives – stands in a light-industrial corner near Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. It is now used for church meetings and other events, but for this immersive staging, directed by Anthony Almeida, it is rebranded The Party HQ.

On entering, the audience is offered red caps, scarves and jackets, and greeted as comrades by chorus members in red jumpsuits. They are the members of the committee to whom the four protagonists – propaganda-disseminating Agitators – report, following their return to Moscow from a mission to fuel the Communist cause in China.

In Brecht’s 1930 play (Die Massnahme, sometimes translated as The Measures Taken), the Agitators report at the start that they have killed the Young Comrade, who joined them as a guide. He had drawn attention to the group, who had to undertake their illegal activity in disguise.

The guide created the risk of exposing the Agitators by feeling a need to act upon smaller-scale workers’ injustices: encouraging hauliers of rice barges to demand more suitable boots; assaulting a policeman who had come to seize propaganda leaflets ahead of a textile-workers’ strike; and refusing to eat with a wealthy merchant, with whom he was supposed to be negotiating to secure arms for protests. As becomes clear through the series of scenes that the Agitators enact for the committee, they kill the guide and dump his body in a lime pit, before returning home.

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