★★★☆☆
It was evident we were in for a strenuously updated staging of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill from the safety warning on the Royal Opera House’s website. This streamed double bill, we were told, would contain “sexual assault, disordered eating, substance abuse, and suicide”. It was the Oxford comma that shocked me; the rest is pretty much mandatory for a 21st-century opera production.
In fact Isabelle Kettle’s staging turned out to be, if anything, not sleazy enough for two shows that are supposed to depict the hypocrisy, exploitation and cynicism underlying capitalism. The Seven Deadly Sins, in which two sisters both called Anna (one singing, one dancing) are degraded on a journey across 1930s America, opened here with a hand-held camera (very active throughout) following the singing Anna from her dressing room to the stage, where she plonked herself in . . . an identical dressing room.
I get the metaphor about women having to play uncomfortable roles, or conform with stereotypes, to get on in society. Yet the set, the costumes and Julia Cheng’s hip-hoppy choreography seemed much too pristine for such a downbeat tale.
That said, individual performances were characterful, with Stephanie Wake-Edwards disintegrating into an anorexic, coke-sniffing wreck as a powerfully sung Anna, and Jonadette Carpio and Thomasin Gulgec dancing with rubber-limbed panache. And under Michael Papadopoulos a virtuoso contingent from the ROH Orchestra injected a sense of apocalyptic terror into one of Weill’s finest scores.
If that show was about society’s abuse of women, Kettle’s stated intention in Mahagonny Songspiel (the 1927 warm-up for the 1930 Brecht/Weill opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) was to present a “crisis of masculinity”. That seemed to mean an excellent quartet of male singers (Filipe Manu, Egor Zhuravskii, Dominic Sedgwick, Blaise Malaba) prancing around in increasingly frenetic routines minus their trousers or dressed in drag. Meanwhile, two formidable women (Wake-Edwards again and Kseniia Nikolaieva) plaintively crooned, “Oh show me the way to the next whisky bar” — a sentiment with which I could easily identify after watching this baffling interpretation.
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It had one extraordinary aspect. The designer Lizzie Clachan had covered all the opera house’s stalls seats with a stage topped by an artificial lawn, and the show was played on this. I hope everyone enjoyed a good game of croquet afterwards.
Available on demand to May 9, roh.org.uk
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