A haunting, unsettling performance in a unique environment – could it work anywhere else?
Opera Cave The Printworks, SE16
The space in which this new one-act opera takes place is astounding – a soaring cathedral nave deep inside the womb of a decommissioned printworks (formerly the home of Associated Newspapers). Numinously dark, its walls hung with vast rolls of white cloth and its floor strewn with shavings, this is the setting for Cave, the result of a collaboration between composer Tansy Davies, poet Nick Drake and director Lucy Bailey.
A portentous parable of the catastrophic mess we are making of our planet, it shows an unnamed man escaping from apocalyptic devastation into a cave he previously visited with his now-dead daughter. A cave is a place of echoes, and here the man imagines and hallucinates and remembers, before receiving an admonishing message from his eco-warrior daughter’s ghost. Finally, there is some personal consolation, but no redemption from a scorched world.
Inspired by visits to the painted caves at Niaux, Drake’s libretto is powerfully resonant, a poem rather than a plot, and clearly very deeply felt. Devoid of structuring ideas or dramatic impetus, Davies’s score doesn’t really measure up to its intensity: it offers a shimmeringly atmospheric soundscape (scored for six soloists enhanced by electronics), rather than something that grows organically out of the text. The vocal writing is sympathetic, with patches of notated speech, but not too memorable: the overall impression is of something too kaleidoscopically gorgeous for its grim subject matter.
But the performance is flawless. Bailey’s production strikes just the right balance between spectacle and austerity, so that there is no sense of excessive theatricality. The music is immaculately played by a chamber ensemble of the London Sinfonietta, enhanced with electronics, and conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, while that remarkable singer Elaine Mitchener embodies the daughter’s spirit with mercurial subtlety. For Mark Padmore as the bereft father, no praise can be too high: he sings with an aching emotion that never becomes breast-beating sentimentality. What one is left with is often beautiful in sound, a threnody always haunting and unsettling in implication. I just wonder how crucially “site-specific” it is, and whether it would have the same impact elsewhere with a lesser cast.
Until June 23. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk