Alfred Hitchcock did it better…
Marnie Eno/london Coliseum
Put Hitchcock’s 1964 movie with Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery out of your mind, we were told: Nico Muhly’s new opera Marnie, set to a libretto by Nicholas Wright, has gone back to the film’s source, a forgotten novel by Winston Graham set in Fifties England and significantly different in both tone and detail.
Would that it were so simple: anyone who remembers how brilliantly Hitchcock moulded and coloured Graham’s tale of a compulsively lying kleptomaniac suffering from a childhood trauma into a subtly woven narrative will be bitterly disappointed at what replaces it: something without a dramatic focus that loses rather than gathers steam and never rises above the anodyne and obvious.
Part of the problem is that the scale is over-blown – the intensity of what is essentially a Freudian case study of female neurosis is dissipated on the vast Coliseum stage in a slickly stylised production by Michael Mayer that doesn’t evoke any precise social context and paints its effects with a broad brush.
There’s no sense of mystery or ambiguity: spelling out her state of mind in soliloquies, Marnie, and her multiple identities, becomes a bland and unengaging figure, whose situation is semaphored in the garishly bright and assertive instrumentation. The solo vocal writing is pleasantly fluent but curiously inexpressive, short of sensuality as well as bite and quite unmemorable melodically. Even more crippling is the lack of any arresting confrontations between the major characters. Imagine the duet that Puccini might have written for the scene where Marnie’s nemesis Mark Rutland blackmails and attempts to rape her!
In the title role, Sasha Cooke, the American mezzo-soprano, sings with admirable warmth and ease, but fails to communicate the character’s deviousness or anxiety. As Mark Rutland, Daniel Okulitch is hopelessly wet. Among a competent supporting cast (including Lesley Garrett), the counter-tenor James Laing stands out as Mark’s scheming brother Terry.
The chorus shines: Muhly is at his most imaginative writing for them, and the temperature rises for their scenes. Alas, being superfluous to the plot, their function is to provide atmosphere and they can’t sustain the opera.
Martyn Brabbins, ENO’S new music director, conducts with enthusiastic commitment, but there is little of substance for the orchestra to get their teeth into.
At half the length, in a much smaller house, it might have had more impact.
Until Dec 3, in repertory with Aida. Tickets: 020 7836 0111; eno.org