A thoroughly pretentious pantomime
Zauberland
Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre ★★★★★
If you read the programme synopsis for this strange event, you will be led to expect the tale of a pregnant Syrian woman who leaves her family in Syria to migrate to Germany and continue her career as a classical singer. But she has a dream in which singing Schumann’s song cycle
Dichterliebe is mixed up with memories of life in Aleppo and her journey west. Someone who has not read this explanation might interpret what they see rather differently, even if the frame and reference point is the sort of austere classical recital favoured by Wigmore Hall.
Behind the game is Katie Mitchell, the most stylistically mannered of contemporary auteur directors, working with playwright Martin Crimp, who contributes a series of gnomically reflective lyrics in English, set to spare atonal music by Belgian composer Bernard Foccroulle, that interrupt and eventually take over from Schumann’s German lieder. These are sung by soprano Julia Bullock (suffering from a fever and therefore not to be judged), played with wonderful clarity and poise by the pianist Cédric Tiberghien. At the risk of sounding like an unreconstructed sexist, I don’t think Dichterliebe is suited to a female voice.
At first, all seems straightforward Singer and pianist embark on Schumann’s work in the usual way. But soon she is assailed by three laconic lackeys, who help and hinder, threaten and protect – blindfolding her, manhandling her, stripping her or dressing her, handing her dead birds, leading her on and holding her back. A dead man, presumably the husband, is laid out on a gurney. The singer mourns him; a spectral bride floats across the stage; snow falls.
Through all this pretentious pantomime, singer and pianist plough on. What happens around her has little illustrative connection to Crimp’s texts, and the compulsive repetition of images or movements becomes increasingly tiresome. There is no overt visual reference to Syria, or to the horrors endured by migrants in their passage out: it is all very recherché and deliberately opaque.
Had it run for an hour, I would have come away pleasantly bemused and intrigued; at 90 minutes, I was left wishing Mitchell would lighten up and lose some of her obsessiveness.