You could blame the unpunctual white rabbit. Yet it’s taken eight years for Unsuk Chin’s first opera to reach Britain. That this Barbican and BBC Symphony Orchestra performance brought the work to the UK on International Women’s Day was a fitting tribute, not just to one of art’s most enduring heroines — Alice herself — but to the accomplished Korean composer as well. One day we won’t need to mention her gender. Yet with not a single music publisher today managing to have more than 17 per cent women on their books, that day is far off.
Chin refuses to take an easy path with her Alice in Wonderland. There is no attempt to make this Alice a real person or to turn the book’s upside-down logic into allegory. Even the traditional narrative is vaguer: Chin inserts a prologue and epilogue that come from her own dream world, not Lewis Carroll’s, which shrouds the whole evening in a particularly surreal glow.
Where she scores handsomely, however, is in her hyper-descriptive score. The humour falls here rather than in David Henry Hwang’s unmusical libretto. The lake of tears is a rippling seascape; the Caterpillar purely voiced by a fiendish bass clarinet (Katherine Lacy, tremendous); and the pepper-loving Cook provokes an infectious sneeze around the orchestra.
Although this was actually a thinned down version of the full orchestration, the range of moods and colours that Chin finds is vast, at times overwhelming. So is the spread of operatic references, including a neo-baroque frenzy surrounding the March Hare’s nonsense riddles.
This is a wonderland of a score, ably controlled by conductor Baldur Brönnimann and well sung by the cast, among them Rachele Gilmore, serene in the vocal stratosphere as Alice, Marie Arnet’s lusciously voiced Cat and the frenzied falsetto of Andrew Watts’s clock-watching bunny.
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Yet turning this Alice into completely satisfying opera is a challenge that ultimately eluded this whizzpopping staging by Netia Jones. Squeezed into the Barbican’s hall, it was certainly lavish, with animations by Ralph Steadman turned into digital cartoons, wacky costumes (Jane Henschel’s Queen of Hearts resplendent in a ruff about as wide as she is high) and plenty of scurrying about the orchestra.
The tone of the show never felt consistent, however, and it rarely teased out the stronger, darker energy of the score — or sharpened its undeniable longueurs. Chin spins out too much for no good dramatic reason and the climactic trial scene, which should be a fizzing finale, is instead a fiddly slog.
Before Chin embarks on her sequel — the Royal Opera House has commissioned her Looking-Glass — she should take some words to heart. “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”