Fun satire fills the room with hope – and superb music
The Silver Lake
English Touring Opera/ Hackney Empire
Acollaboration between Kurt Weill and Expressionist playwright Georg Kaiser, The Silver Lake is a sharply critical, yet ultimately hopeful musical satire banned by the Nazis in March 1933, only weeks after its premiere in Leipzig. Weill left Germany shortly afterwards never to return, and the piece has subsequently become a rarity, never achieving the popularity of his collaborations with Brecht. It was heard at the BBC Proms in 1996, but not, I think, anywhere in the UK since.
One of the problems it presents is that of excessive length – a complete performance would consist of 90 minutes of music and 90 minutes of spoken text, requiring opera singers who are also skilled actors, and almost every attempt at revival has involved considerable abridgement. English Touring Opera’s truncated version runs at under two hours, which accounts for a certain fuzziness in the storyline.
The plot revolves around the attempt by Olim, a consciencestricken policeman, to atone for shooting the wretchedly unemployed Severin, who has robbed a grocery store for a pineapple. Eventually, despite forces conspiring against them, the two men confront each other and are reconciled, setting off together to cross the eponymous silver lake, still frozen as winter melts into spring, to a better world.
The symbolism is heavy-handed and naive, but touchingly sincere, couched in the non-naturalistic agitprop style familiar from Brecht’s plays, with a narrator and placards proclaiming slogans and prompts. What hasn’t dated is Weill’s superb score – free of romantic rhetoric, yet melodically heartfelt, this is music of rousing protest that is also formally sophisticated. ETO’S orchestra, conducted by James Holmes, an expert in this repertory, plays it with ideal swagger and precision. James Conway’s production is spare, simple and direct, designed around a movable framework of steel platforms. It could pick up in urgency – at present, cues are taken up sluggishly and dramatic pauses are needlessly protracted – but the look, the idiom and the atmosphere are spot on. Even the odd decision to play the piece in a macaronic mixture of English and German, with only intermittent surtitles, works perfectly well.
David Webb is outstandingly good both vocally and histrionically as the resentful prole Severin, and Ronald Samm makes a sympathetic figure of the copper Olim. Luci Briginshaw sings the hit number Ich bin eine arme Verwandte with steely charm, and Clarissa Meek radiates repressed nastiness as a housekeeper in the Mrs Danvers mould. This is a hugely enjoyable and morally bracing show, well worth catching on its forthcoming tour.
Touring nationwide until Nov 15. Details: 020 7833 2555; englishtouringopera.org.uk