Death In Venice
Welsh National Opera Bristol Hippodrome ★★★★✩
THE idea of incorporating circus skills into a story as complex as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, with Benjamin Britten’s final opera score as accompaniment, at first glance appears to be a ludicrous suggestion. Balletic skills might highlight the autobiographical themes of Mann’s slow discovery of his own sexuality, and the inevitability of death which pervades almost every note of the dying Britten’s score, but circus skills would surely be a mere distraction.
And to an extent that may be true because the wonderful circus and dance skills that Antony Cesar, with his fellow circus performers, brought to the role of the beautiful youth Tadzio, were often so breathtaking that at times the music became a shadowy figure in the background.
But it was a shadow that thanks to a brilliantly intense performance by Mark Le Brocq as the ageing author Gustav von Aschenbach, desperately searching for something to reignite his dried up imagination was, like the waters of the Venice lagoon on the video screen, always firmly in place. To depict Aschenbach’s internal battles as he fights against discovery of his true sexual self, required, and received, tremendous acting as well as vocal skills and, in a role where you virtually never leave the stage, enormous concentration.
Matching, indeed inspiring Mark Le Brocq and Antony Cesar’s wonderful vocal and physical performances on stage, was the imagination of the creative team: director Olivia Fuchs, designer Nicola Turner, lighting and video designers Robbie Butler and Sam Sharples, and circus consultant Tom Rack. By rights their combined efforts should have overwhelmed the story and the music, but miraculously they found a format that allowed all the elements to thrive together to produce not so much a night at the opera but more an exciting theatrical experience.
Faced with the task of interpreting Benjamin Britten’s score in a manner to help and support not only the singers but circus performers, the WNO Orchestra under the self-effacing baton of Leo Hussain ticked every box. There are suggestions that this fine orchestra should be partially dismantled and turned into a part
time group. There was a minor disturbance which interrupted the performance for 15 minutes or so, but did not put the cast or orchestra off their stroke. The many fans of the WNO are likely to cause a much bigger disturbance if what is acknowledged to be one of the best opera orchestras is dismantled in any way.