A terrific cast are wasted in this witless, vacuous twaddle
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground
Royal Opera, Covent Garden
★★★★★
Lewis Carroll’s sublime trick in the Alice books is to present a rather prim and smug but altogether charming Victorian child encountering – with a mixture of bafflement, contempt and anxiety
– an adult world in which the logic of language and the expectations of ordinary reality are inverted. The delicate comic balance this entails is ignored in Gerald Barry’s slam-bang opera, which takes its title from an early version of the text but conflates episodes from both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass into a single 50-minute act. There’s not a glimmer of Carroll’s lithe intellectual gymnastics here, nor his sly dry wit; instead, we are propelled along a cacophonous helter-skelter ride to nowhere.
From Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole to her final coronation, the mood is predominantly hysterical and the pace manic. Alice herself is a skittering coloratura soprano; the brass splutters, clatters and dominates; there is much frenzied repetition but no development. Familiar figures such as the Cheshire Cat and Mad Hatter appear momentarily, only to be whisked away before they have had a chance to establish any personality. Snatches of spoken dialogue and passages in French and German are pointlessly interpolated.
That Barry (a pupil of Stockhausen, and some sort of musical anarchist) has imagination isn’t in question – five minutes before the end, he produces something elegiacally beautiful for the tournament between the Red and White Knights – but because he evinces no self-discipline, no sense of dramatic shape or artistic tact, the result is exhausting rather than exhilarating. The children sitting near me were first baffled, then bored.
There are few things in the world of art more embarrassing than opera singers trying to be funny, but I must take my hat off to the unsinkable Claudia Boyle (Alice), as well as Sam
Furness, Mark Stone, Peter Tantsits, Joshua Bloom, Clare Presland and Hilary Summers, who take on multiple roles with terrific energy and aplomb. A second cast takes over at some performances.
Antony Mcdonald has directed and designed an engaging staging framed in the manner of a Pollock’s Toy Theatre. Thomas Adès conducts the orchestra with all the obsessivecompulsive intensity that Barry’s loony tunes demand. What I heard and saw was expertly executed, but frankly I would prefer to stand in the rain selling The Big Issue than suffer a single note of this vacuous dada twaddle ever again.
Until Sunday. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk