Now nearly 20 years old, John Adams’s seminal “docu-opera” is still one of the most thrilling, funny, poignant and contentious music-theatre pieces written in my lifetime. When English National Opera brought it to London six years ago, my colleague Rodney Milnes described its subject, Nixon’s 1972 summit with Mao, as “a clash of cultures unimaginable in these days of electronic communication”. But since then America has gone through 9/11 — a very different clash of cultures, but also one that was apparently unimaginable until it happened. Suddenly, the subtext so cleverly explored by Alice Goodman’s text — a US president stumbling like a naive tourist into an alien world of which he has little understanding — has been given a whole new context.
However, it’s greatly to the credit of the production’s director, Peter Sellars, that he (uncharacteristically) resists the temptation to hint at recent events. It is left to audiences to ruminate on how the dark, Tolstoyan ending — Chou En-lai’s anguished monologue (admirably sung by Mark Stone), questioning whether politicians can ever change anything for the better — is pertinent to our present, benighted bunch of leaders.
Instead, Sellars has refined and polished his original 1987 staging. The great set pieces, staged in Adrianne Lobel’s chillingly impassive Beijing vistas, still have the feel of grandiose spectacle teetering on the verge of madness: the Boeing landing in a surge of Wagnerian opulence; the blissfully over-the-top toasting scene; the spoof Red Army revolutionary ballet (Mark Morris’s wickedly satirical choreography) that whirls deliciously out of control and somehow draws the Nixons and Kissinger into its surreal violence. But the ending, where these mighty figures are forced to acknowledge that the tide of history is slipping inexorably out of their grasp, now seems even more sad and fatalistic.
That mood is also what Adams’s music conveys so vividly. Its perpetually chugging minimalist rhythms suggest the relentless carousel of political life. Its synthesizer-boosted orchestral splendour evokes the statesmen’s empty bombast. And its gorgeously autumnal lyricism allows characters to express their forlorn helplessness. It’s a masterpiece of its kind, and in the pit Paul Daniel shapes it even better this time round. The cast (slightly amplified) is superb: Adrian Thompson hilariously strident as the ranting, geriatric Mao, groping his sycophantic secretaries; Judith Howarth trilling into the stratosphere as the megalomaniac Madame Mao; Roland Wood sordid and sinister as Kissinger; and best of all, James Maddalena and Janis Kelly, uncannily lifelike and touchingly vulnerable as the Nixons. Snap up a ticket and see history replayed as epic and provocative farce.
Box office: 0870 1450200