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Susan’s Bookshelves: The Wives of Halcyon by Eirinie Lapidaki

I found this book quite literally almost impossible to put down. And even when I had to, I thought about it continually. It got right under my skin. Published earlier this year, it was praised in Good Housekeeping  by Ruth Hogan as “a dazzling debut” and thank goodness Ruth highlighted it because otherwise it might have passed me by.

We’re in an enclosed community – an extreme Christian cult – in the remote Scottish Highlands. In charge is a “prophet” – God’s mouthpiece – known as Elijah. He has three wives, one of whom was his original legal wife when he lived with her in a flat in town. He plans to take another, a teenager, soon as advised, he says, by God. The book is narrated by the three women in turn, eventually joined by the fourth, so that Lapidaki can gradually and very skilfully reveal where they came from, how they lived before, how they live now and what they feel.  Thus we “hear” four very distinctive voices – and, of course, we can see past their narration. Cracks are showing. Elijah and his henchman John are clearly not quite what they seem or claim to be but the women are all transfixed at some level by Elijah’s sexual charisma and authority. They have also come to value the warmth of communal living. So their thoughts, feelings and emotions are complicated.

Of course children are born. There is no medical support apart from Ruth, one of the “sister wives” who has an American midwifery qualification. Elijah doesn’t trust any sort of authority other than his own, including hospitals.  Although it’s not laboured, this is a clear breach of the law because none of the children born at Halycon (also known as Heaven on Earth) is registered. Babies are allowed 40 days with their mothers and then moved to the school house for communal care. Women are not permitted individual contact with their own children. And “discipline” in the schoolhouse, we gradually realise, is dreadful abuse. When Ollie has to be treated for hypothermia it sets alarm bells ringing. Lapidaki is very good indeed at drip-feeding the hints via her narrators. At one point one of them notices – in passing  – that the pupils of Elijah’s eyes are tiny. It is enough to alert the reader.

One of the tenets of this extreme form of literalist Christianity (Elijah can produce a Bible quote, usually Old Testament, to support any assertion) is that “The End” is coming. The world will crumble and all the “sinners” – that is anyone outside Halcyon – will go to hell. Well, of course, he’s right. The end does come, rather more prosaically than Elijah promises but you don’t need spoilers here.

The really interesting thing about this novel is that it’s very nuanced. We have all read about these brain-washing religious cults. And we all know that Lord Acton was right: absolute power certainly does corrupt, arguably more in a religious setting than any other because there is a claim to a higher authority. Think of the medieval popes or some of the Ayatollahs today. But it happens gradually. The image we get from Aoife, the first wife, of Elijah back in the city helping her sick mother in a kind, Christian way is warm, attractive and –  well –  normal. Then he decides that their splinter group church, in which they are both involved, should cut itself off. Step by step, ever stricter rules emerge. It’s totally patriarchal, for example. Women are not allowed to express opinions or to challenge men. Of course there’s no smoking or alcohol. Food is very basic and it’s cold because money is an evil so, on a day to day basis there isn’t any. There is no modern technology such as mobile phones and very few electric lights. But do these rules apply to everybody?

No money? Converts donate their life savings and the proceeds of the sale of their homes to Halcyon funds. Aoife is the community accountant and she begins to notice discrepancies. It’s pretty obvious where it’s going – although not, for a long time, to her.

Human beings are like swans. They are programmed to be monogamous  –  often serially, these days. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there is tension between the women because they are jealous of each other. And that is exacerbated by things such as Elijah’s failure to spend the night with the “right” wife according to a rota and Aiofe’s failure to conceive although she has already borne three children. Elijah, we learn, has fathered twelve.  The people who live at Halcyon all have mixed feelings as the novel progresses. There is something richly supportive in communal living based on love and prayer but …

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan

Much Ado About Nothing

William Shakespeare

Moving Parts Theatre

Director Simona Hughes

The Actors’ Church, Covent Garden

Star rating: 3

There’s a lot of it about at the moment: you could even say there’s much ado about a certain Shakespeare play. I seem to have seen it several times in the last year or two and there’s another production across the river at The Globe which I haven’t yet caught up with.

Anyway, this is decent enough production of what I’ve always thought of as a rather strange play. The most interesting thing in it is the delicious chemistry between Beatrice and Benedick and their eventual, inevitable coming together. Everyone can see that they are made for each other. It’s just a matter of manipulating them into seeing it for themselves. In a sense everything else is a side show. Yet this version doesn’t bring that out as strongly as it should  and although Joanna Nevin and Martin South work well enough together, I didn’t feel the magnetic attraction between them

This production opens with a scene which is nothing to do with Shakespeare. Instead we get Katrina Michaels (who becomes Margaret) and Will Benyon (ditto Borachio) doing a version of the traditional Soldier, Soldier Will You Marry Me? to the tune of Funiculi Funicula. And it adds nothing, apart from hinting that Margaret and Borachio might have the hots for each other but as we don’t yet know who they are, it doesn’t work. On the other hand Michaels is a fine actor muso (beautiful, very unusual wooden accordion) who projects oodles of sexy personality and Margaret is much more of a presence in this production than she would normally be. Benyon too – good guitarist – is ever present, projecting delicious insolence, and we get a strong sense of his self-interested amorality. However, their frequent arm gestures to control other characters, as Puck or Ariel might, are against the grain of the text and arguably absurd.

Lewis Jenkins, strong as Claudio, made me reflect afresh on what an unpleasant young man this character  is. He falls for Hero (Thissy Dias – good)  at first glance – probably mostly because she’s the only child of a wealthy father. Then when he’s tricked into thinking that she’s no virgin he jilts her publicly at the altar to maximise the cruelty rather than breaking off the betrothal in private. When he believes Hero is dead he readily agrees to take Beatrice instead (as presumably she will now be the beneficiary of her uncle’s estate). Then, finally, when Hero is “resurrected” he grabs her gleefully. Well, if I’d been Hero I’d have told him to take a running jump and we used to have interesting classroom discussions about this when I was teaching this play to GCSE and A level students. Jenkins does all that “eye to the main chance” stuff, patriarchal disdain and joshing with his mates very well.

Keith Hill is outstanding as Leonato. He plays him as slightly dim, deeply fond of his daughter, Hero, and full of earnestness and embarrassment. When he believes the plotters rather than his daughter, it’s genuinely painful. Hill is an exceptionally fine listener and reactor too. It’s beautifully shaped and nuanced performance.

And  Michaels, who really is very talented, is hilarious when she doubles as the Constable and spits out all those malapropisms.

The garden at The Actors’ Church is delightful but it’s a challenging space to work in because the competition from the noisy performers and crowds in the Piazza, is very loud. The playing space is, on this occasion, a very big grassy oval with audience round most of the edge, either one or two rows deep. Simona Hughes and her cast use the space  dynamically and energetically which means that the action is often very close to audience members. Moreover, these nine actors have learned to project at a volume which means, remarkably given the situation, that you can hear every word,  Full marks for that and for the clarity of the story telling.

Are there two better words, by the way, anywhere in Shakespeare than Beatrices’s “Kill Claudio”?  It’s funny (and Nevin times it beautifully) because it’s outrageous but by golly, I know where she’s coming from.

Iolanthe

WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

Gardiner Memorial Hall, Burwell, Cambs

Directed by Lucas Elkin

 Star rating 4

Photography by Jet Photographic Cambridge

Cambridgeshire Light Opera Group (CLOG) is a new company which has risen from the ashes of Swaffham Bulbeck Summer Theatre which closed last year. And it’s a good example of how you can present this marvellous material in a village hall, with almost no resources, a mixed ability community cast and still carry it off –  providing you use your imagination and think laterally.

There is, for example, no set to speak of. Instead we get projected scenes on the back screen – Iolanthe’s pond, the House of Lords and so on. In fact, if you do it this way, you can change setting as often as you like and this production does. The rest of the set consists mostly of four very versatile black boxes which stand for seats, tables and the famous sentry box. It’s simple, clean and ingenious.

And Cleo Loi, MD has arranged the music for just four players. She plays keys, percussion and violin alongside a second keyboard player, a cello and a reed-instrument player. I loved the way, once it settles after the overture, she weaves the melodies and counter melodies together. The cello continuo works particularly well.

If you have no budget, then modern dress makes sense because it’s easy to improvise. Of course Peers would wear dark suits and the coloured sashes to indicate party allegiance are neat. And as for the fairies, well, these “peris” simply wear weird floaty mismatching outfits, unified by their all being in stripey tights.

There are some accomplished performers in this show too. The Lord Chancellor is usually an elderly, querulous little man. Not this time. Peter Coleman stands taller and has more gravitas than anyone else on stage which completely changes the character and that’s refreshing. Coleman sings exceptionally well and every single word is clear – as it needs to be, especially in the Nightmare Song. He has also been directed to time Gilbert’s sparkling dialogue so that he is really very funny, as events gradually conspire against his authority. His is definitely a Lord Chancellor to remember.

Caroline Dyson, a well known figure on the Cambridgeshire community musical theatre circuit, is rich and warm as the Fairy Queen. She has, for these times, an unusual voice trained into the gorgeous depths of the traditional contralto. If, like me, you’re mildly synaesthetic, it’s aubergine. And her flirting with Private Willis (Paul Murray John in battle fatigues and brewing tea – nice touch) is a delight.

Sally Goldsmith is a fine Iolanthe too – emerging from her watery exile from behind the umbrellas weilded by her fairy sisters. She sings in the mezzo range with fluent accuracy  and is convincing as an anxious mother. Of course she doesn’t look seventeen but – hey – this is community work and it doesn’t matter a jot.

Among other soloists, all of whom acquit themselves creditably, Caille Peri is wide eyed and assertive as Phyllis and Ariel Cahn sings Strephon’s part with pleasing musicality.

Chorus work is nicely managed in a small space and the production makes imaginative use of the side aisles – bring the Peers in initially from the back, for example, while they mutter “upper class twerp” stuff to each other.

When one reviews any sort of show it has be assessed as a show of its type. And this Iolanthe is an excellent show of its type: village hall opera lovingly done.

I am so glad that CLOG has almost sold out every one on its five performances and is now looking forward to its next production. I am too.

I knew just two things about Mozart’s travels in Italy: First, that he was commissioned to write an opera for Milan when he was only 14. Second, that he heard the Allegri Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, returned to his lodgings and wrote it down from memory thereby “spoiling” a Vatican secret and enhancing his own reputation.

There was, obviously, much more to his three tours of Italy between 1769 and 1773 than that. Jane Glover, who subtitles her excellent book “Coming of age in the land of opera”, is able to detail those three gruelling trips in exquisite detail because so many letters have survived along with the writings of contemporaries such as  Dr Charles Burney. The first tour involved the whole family –  Wolfgang’s father, Leopold, his mother Maria Anna and his older sister Nannerl. Thereafter it was just Leopold and Wolfgang to the chagrin of the women left behind in Salzburg but those separations at least meant there were many more letters than there might otherwise have been. Wolfgang’s letters to Nannerl are sparky and often silly thus revealing a lot about the jokey, sibling affection between them

Leopold was something of a mixed blessing as a parent. He was an assiduous cultivator of “useful” contacts, a calculating organiser and his attitude sometimes alienated people. He also had a somewhat cavalier attitude to his court post in Salzburg seeming to think that he could walk away from it for long periods and still be paid. Glover describes the tone of a letter he wrote to his employer in 1777 as “By turns petulant, bossy, self pitying, rebellious, recriminatory and always seeking to inhabit the higher ground of moral superiority”. Of course, as Wolfgang grew up he and his father – from whom he seems to have inherited the inability to manage money – didn’t always see eye to eye. Nonetheless, Wolfgang was devastated by Leopold’s death in 1788.

Glover argues that Mozart fell in love with opera in Italy where he saw many productions, wrote three commissioned operas (and many other compositions) and worked with the finest singers in Europe.  His opera Lucio Silla (K135) ran in Milan for 26 performances despite the opening show starting three hours late because of the delayed arrival at the theatre of the Archduke and Archduchess. Returning home and writing for singers in Austria and Germany was a disappointment because standards were much lower. And he always wrote for specific voices. Once Mozart met a singer and learned what he or she could do the music was tailored accordingly.

It took days to travel between one city and another in the eighteenth century. Coaches were uncomfortable and roads very uneven. When the going, quite literally, got rough Wolfgang took refuge in composition. Glover asserts that he could “remove himself from uncomfortable, or even harsh, reality, and escape to another realm in his imagination, where his creativity blossomed and bore fruit.” I love the idea, for example, that he wrote a string quartet in Bolzano in late September 1772, en route from the Brenner Pass to Milan. They were delayed by heavy rain, and it was a town detested by both Leopold and Wolfgang.  The composition was probably K155 which I’ve played many times. There are six of these, known as the Milanese quartets written in his spare time on that tour. They are all, of course, delightful and beloved of amateur string players.

Glover argues that although he never returned to Italy, after the third trip, it had taught him much at the most receptive time of his life. Thereafter  he would  “bring Italy with him whenever he wrote for an opera house or for exceptional singers”. The 1780s brought new opportunities and Glover traces the influence of all Mozart’s great operas back to his Italian experience.

Of course I have been familiar with Jane Glover’s work as a conductor and music educator (TV and radio) for decades. She is a multi-talented woman. This book is as beautifully written as it is informative. It’s also accessible. You don’t need a music degree to enjoy this one.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Wives of Halcyon by Eirinie Lapidaki

The Caretaker

Harold Pinter

Directed by Justin Audibert

Chichester Festival Theatre, Minerva

Star rating: 4

As Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch, The Caretaker is a play for grown ups. Pinter’s 1960 masterpiece combines enigma and economy. Compared with many of the shows I see it is, frankly, like a glass of pure lemonade after months of gloopy, over-sweet hot chocolate.  And of course it comes with a wealth of potential for interpretation.

Enter Justin Audibert and his trio of talented actors each of whom inhabits his character totally in a production which sees each man as deeply troubled, lonely misfit trying somehow to find a way of surviving life. The storyline, is simple (homeless man is invited to stay by a man with mental health issues in a house which belongs to the latter’s brother). The subtext is anything but. And it’s a play without any sort of solution or resolution. These people will simply continue indefinitely with their pitiful struggles and tensions.

Ian McDiarmid as Davies is variously querulous, boastful, anxious, exploitative, vulnerable and very anxious about newly arrived black people about whom he carps constantly because he sees them as a threat.  He stammers when he gets excited and sleeps noisily – which infuriates Aston (Adam Gillen) and impresses and amuses the audience. Under the Falstaffian bravado, he is deeply relieved to have been offered a bed. McDiarmid does the repetitiveness and impassioned conversation of a damaged person with total conviction. It’s a fine performance.

Gillen’s character is brain damaged and he talks in a very convincing flat monotone.  His star moment, though, comes in the famous monologue at the end of the first half when he describes the electro-convulsive treatment he’s been forced to undergo. He makes it horrifyingly moving and as he speaks, Simon Spencer’s lighting design gradually reduces and dims and Jonathan Girling’s music cuts in underneath him. No wonder, at the performance I saw, the stunned audience shuffled out for interval drinks and lavatories much more quietly than usual.

Jack Riddiford as Mick, Aston’s intensely impatient and angry brother, speaks with high speed fluency, and yet he is clearly very protective of his brother. The relationship between him and Aston is complex. And he’s resentful of Davies – a hint of jealously in this production so the fury when Davies maligns his brother is very plausible. But Mick is also an escapist dreamer of impossible dreams and Riddiford captures that too – in contrast with Davies who says he never dreams, although we don’t quite believe him.

Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set is gloriously grey, tatty, junk-strewn and squalid. The window on the back wall has only a sack for a curtain over which we see grey light coming into the room and, at one point, rain. It’s a near perfect setting for this powerful, intelligent play which sends you away pondering.

The Barber of Seville
Opera Holland Park
Performance date: 13 June 2024
Star rating: 4

An unseasonably gusty, chilly London evening was transformed into a balmy summer in Seville at Opera Holland Park. Director Cecilia Stinton utilised every inch of the vast performing space, starting with a delightful set of cameos for the all-male ensemble through the overture, setting up a band that will grudgingly perform (albeit well-oiled with alcohol and cash) in Count Almaviva’s (Elgan LlŷrThomas) attempted wooing of Rosina (Heather Lowe).

The fine chemistry between these two actors is clear from the outset: Llŷr Thomas, reminding me a floppy-haired Hugh Grant of the mid-1990s, sings with a brilliance….. whilst Lowe as the feisty, clever Rosina covers the vast tessitura the role demands with the perfect blend of assertiveness and
coquettishness.

On summoning Figaro, ostensibly a barber but actually a general fixer, Paul Grant rises to the challenge of perhaps the best-known aria of them all with a fizzy effervescence that carries the character through the entire piece. Stephen Gadd, meanwhile, presents a delightfully pompous Dr Bartolo, Rosina’s guardian, who wishes to marry her himself.

The Act 1 finale, building from duet to sextet is a fine example of the Rossini crescendo. Rising and falling in waves as the characters’ utter confusion and misunderstandings ebb and flow. it was among the finest renditions I’ve ever heard, in which the main characters are joined by Jihoon Kim’s sonorous Dr Bartolo and Janis Kelly’s exasperated housekeeper.

A delightful touch in the music lesson scene was a semi-breaking of the fourth wall, conductor Charlotte Cordery being temporarily replaced at the podium by Almaviva. And it is Rossini’s sparkling score (written at the ridiculously precocious age of 23) that is the absolute star of the show. In difficult playing conditions (a particular nod to David Smith for the continuo, played
presumably with fingers he could barely feel) The City of London Sinfonia’s players under Cordery zipped along delightfully.

I enjoyed the bustle of this production (rarely have I seen so many props used, or actors cover so much ground), Despite the coldness of the evening, it left me with the warm glow of satisfaction of an evening very well spent.

 

Three Men in a Boat

Adapted for the Stage by Clive Francis from book by Jerome K Jerome

The Mill at Sonning

Directed by Joe Harmston

 Star rating: 4

Well we all know what happens. Three chaps, inferentially Etonians, set off along the Thames in a small boat with their dog and there are episodic encounters – humorous ones.

Clive Francis’s adaptation sits neatly on The Mill at Sonning’s big stage with Sean Cavanagh’s set providing an oval, green quasi pond on the which the “boat” can be foot paddled. None of it is fussy. There’s a lot of mime – the oars and Montmorency the dog, for example, are left to our imagination. Meanwhile, Tom Lishman’s sound design gives us bird song, watery noises, a thunderstorm and more while Mike Robertson’s lighting provides lots of atmosphere. And each time they reach a new spot on the river (including Sonning – nice touch) there’s a black and white photograph projected on to the back screen. It’s a show laden with wit, charm and deftness of touch.

James Bradshaw as George, Sean Rigby as Harris and George Watkins as K (aka Jerome K Jerome) are all effective actors. Bradshaw and Rigby in particular are very good at stepping briefly into other roles such as a very funny episode in a riverside inn when four different men claim to have landed the trout displayed in the bar. All are played by Rigby,  altering his voice, bearing and position of his striped blazer each time. They banter, josh and are wickedly superior to most other river users. It’s entitlement played for laughs and yet another comedy rooted in social class. And I liked the way Joe Harmston and his cast dug out a few innuendoes and leaned on them,. The songs are fun too. Rigby agrees to sing a “comic song” and makes a glorious mess of confusing two patter songs from HMS Pinafore and Trial by Jury. And the three of them sing the Eton Boating Song in harmony.

Enjoyably entertaining as it is, it feels lightweight – but at the very end it changes direction and finds itself a purpose which is what gained it my fourth star. Jerome K Jerome’s novel was published in 1889 but this production shunts it forward 20 years so that we’re in that hedonistic, peaceful “Edwardian summer” when young men who didn’t, apparently, need to work for a living could simply don their striped jackets and go off on a carefree boating trip. But of course that freedom and innocence didn’t last.  The world was hurtling towards 1914 after which nothing would ever be the same again. It meant that we left the theatre in a more sombre mood than I thought we would at the start of the show: bitter sweet nostalgia imaginatively done.

 

 

The Valentine Letters

Steve Darlow based on Gepruft by Frances Zagni

Directed by Jo Emery

Fighting High Productions

Jack Studio

 

Star rating: 3

 

An epistolary play is a brave idea. If the script is based  entirely on letters than there is no scope for dialogue and that takes a lot of managing. Director Jo Emery and her cast of three do their best with this true story (the original letters are in the Imperial War Museum at Duxford) and most of the time it more or less works.

It is, of course, a very familiar story. My generation grew up with accounts of how our parents and their contemporaries coped during World War 2. Both my own parents (my father was in the RAF like John Valentine) and my in-laws had wartime marriages and endured long separations. I worked for a head teacher who was born in 1947. She had siblings born in 1936 and 1938. Her father was taken prisoner at the beginning of the war and her parents were apart for six years.

Nonetheless, there are now two generations beyond me,  many of whom won’t know these stories, so The Valentine Letters details something worth sharing. John Valentine (Tom Hilton) and his wife Ursula (Katie Hamilton) marry and a child Frances (Charlotte Dummond-Dunn) is born. Then John is in an operation over Germany which goes wrong but is actually one of the luckier ones because he bales out and ends up as prisoner of war in Germany for four years.

The play is constructed round Frances finding and reading her parents’ powerful love letters after they’re both dead and in places it’s quite moving. She acts as a sort of narrator/commentator as they – on opposite sides of the stage write letters to each other. And of course Ursula sends parcels.  All three actors are adept at conveying a great deal of facial emotion as the letters gradually chart the four years of separation and privation – during which Ursula buys a house and tries to make a home, John tries to learn the violin and Frances grows from a baby into a little girl. It isn’t plain sailing even after the release of prisoners in spring 1945 because John is seriously ill by then. It’s a survival story in every sense.

Dramatically though, it feels a bit flat because there are three characters on stage who, for a very long time, are in separate zones. For all that, each of these actors turns out a convincing performance with Hilton and Hamilton nailing 1940s RP pretty well whereas Frances speaks differently – as she would.  And they, and the play, give us a strong, pretty natural sense of how the letters range over very ordinary things (washing socks and cycling in the rain) to big dreams and hopes of being reunited eventually.