ALBERT HERRING
Gas Street Central, Birmingham *****
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s production of Britten’s witty satire on smalltown life has proved a triumphant collaboration between several colleges, and high praise to all involved.
The cast is a compact one (13 singers), so in fact the four performances have been able to feature two teams. I caught the Blue Cast on Saturday afternoon. Matinees are obviously congenial times for those of us of a certain age, and this versatile, performance-leaning church just off Birmingham’s lively Broad Street, was packed. Fortunately the RBC Department of Vocal and Operatic Studies hasn’t totally followed the example of the legendary late Graham Vick, who preferred to present shows in a variety of spaces, from factories to churches, and to get the audience to mill and shift around as participants, There wasn’t any of that nonsense here, just an opening dining-room and then a move to a resourceful thrust stage where we all had surrounding seats.
Singing was consistently accurate, but equally as important was the characterisation conveyed by the singers under Rebecca Meltzer’s deft direction. Elissa Street made us instantly dislike Lady Billows, the terror of the townsfolk, the slightest twitch of her haughty features instilling fear; her harassed but stroppy assistant, Florence Pike, was played by India Harding as a gorgon in her own right; and so this delineation of character spread through the cast: Abigail Baylis (Miss Wordsworth the headmistress); William Swinnerton a typically hand-wringing curate (Mr Gedge); Joe Yates the self-important, inwardly insecure Mayor Upfold; Shuai Zhang a stentorian Sergeant Budd hiding behind his uniform.
Sid and Nancy, the young proletarian lovers (such a stock combination ever since the commedia dell’arte) were engagingly portrayed by Oliver Barker and Jade McLellan, Millie Royle, Sydney Suffield and Georgi Davies were convincingly mischievous street-urchins, and Ellen Smith made Mrs Herring, the widowed shopkeeper, a character of some depth.
As her eponymous son Albert, Justin Jacobs made a wonderful job of coping with Britten’s rather strange treatment of his allegedly lead role. The character is introduced only gradually, not really taking central stage until his huge, chaotic scena at the beginning of the final act, disappearing again (during which absence the other nine principals sing the amazing threnody “In the midst of Life is Death), and finally throwing off the shackles at his miraculous reappearance.
Britten’s score is not without its longueurs, and could easily be tightened up by something like a quarter of an hour. But it does have its delights: the threnody, the often contrapuntal writing niftily sneaked in, the satirical nods to Wagner (Siegfried’s horn call when we await the arrival of the hero Albert, the Tristan and Isolde love potion music when Sid is spiking Albert’s drink).
Paul Wingfield conducted, achieving an amazing synchronicity between singers and a tight little orchestra, even though there was a notable physical separation between these two performing groups. Costumes designed by students of the London College of Fashion evoked the cosy, complacent ambience of the opera’s setting atmospherically, and the make-up, hair and wigs devised by students at University College Birmingham transformed these young students into well-set-up middleclass figures.
I was so thrilled to have loved this presentation (having feared the Vickian worst – we could all have been guests at the May King’s crowning, we could all have been search parties hunting for the errant Albert), but felt a little disappointed in the printed programme: no mention of librettist Eric Crozier, no mention of the so-important English Opera Group which occasioned the creation of so many Britten operas, and no mention of the Linbury Trust, which has done so much to support opera at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire over the last few years.
Christopher Morley