Considering the potency of childbirth in life and metaphor, it’s a wonder we haven’t been swamped with operas featuring pregnant heroines in the throes. Nursed by the Genesis Opera Project, brought to vigorous life by Bill Bankes-Jones and the Tête à Tête company, Push! repairs the omission with wit and panache; tenderness too.
By the end of the opera, six mothers have generated ten babies, including one set of quintuplets and one stillborn. Along the way we’ve been rocketed between social satire, rumbustious fantasy and the wonder of the ordinary, urged onwards by the dizzying score of David Bruce, past creator of the mini-opera Seven Tons of Dung, a subject that strangely escaped Wagner.
Melodic and rhythmic fragments tumble out like a Looney Tunes soundtrack, chasing each other round squeaking winds, frantic strings, rude brass, keyboards, mouth-organ and accordion. Fun to play for the musicians, under the alert beat of the conductor, Tim Murray; equally fun to listen to, especially next to Tim Meacock’s sleek set, the kind you’d find if Mondrian ever decorated hospitals.
At times the vocals sit perilously on top of this hurly-burly. Considering the sharp wit of Anna Reynolds’s libretto (available online like the score: www.pushopera.com), it’s a pity when words become submerged. But given the right voice, they hit home with ease; Louise Mott, as the mother faced with birth and death together, is especially eloquent. Hard to ignore Tara Harrison, too, as the prisoner mother, still in chains, while a model young couple, tucked away on her right, fuss and coo in candyfloss shirts.
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If Push! offered only buffoonery and jabs it would be a brilliant but heartless show. Bruce and Reynolds don’t make that mistake. We end with Jacqueline Miura’s cleaner, the character who is threaded through episodes with mop, cloth and the attentive hospital caretaker. Gifted with a wonderfully expressive face, she screams in waves of anguished song, with the ensemble in tow. By the end, a new infant lies cradled in her arms; plus a new opera, vibrant and relevant.
Long life to them both.
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