This exhilarating double bill stimulates the heart and the mind
The Seven Deadly Sins/ Mahagonny Songspiel Royal Opera House ★★★★★
On Friday, when many performances were cancelled after the death of Prince Philip, the Royal Opera House went ahead with the streamed premiere of two satirical works by Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill.
Some may feel the company’s decision was disrespectful, but I think it did the right thing. Not only was there a minute’s silence, I reckon the Duke of Edinburgh, who was well known for finding opera a tremendous bore, might have enjoyed the theatrical flair of these shows – and the hit songs.
For the rest of us, it’s a relief to discover there is still a creative heart beating at Covent Garden – and it’s the youngsters who are leading the way. This double bill features seven current participants in the Jette Parker Young Artists scheme, directed by Isabelle Kettle.
First comes The Seven Deadly Sins, a “sung ballet” in which sisters Anna 1 and 2 roam from city to city, hoping to earn money to allow their family to build a house, and learning the hard way that it’s hard to be moral when you’re desperate. Then comes the Mahagonny Songspiel, a set of songs about a legendary pleasure city where all the pleasures turn out to be illusory, and the bewildered inhabitants learn they are in a sort of hell.
Both pieces are rich in ironic switchbacks, so my heart sank when I read Kettle had reimagined the first piece as a “timely comment on gender politics”, and that the two
together “depict a crisis of femininity and a crisis of masculinity respectively”. Wouldn’t Brecht’s carefully crafted parables and Kettle’s imposition of an up-to-date, totally different agenda be like oil and water?
I needn’t have worried. Both pieces are carried off with such exhilarating theatrical panache and intelligence that the two agendas actually fuse and become one. In the first, Anna 2, played by the dancer Jonadette Carpio, becomes the perfect leather-clad, sinuous object of male fantasy to achieve her goal, but you can see the distress and self-disgust in those gyrating limbs.
Her sister, played wonderfully by the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Wakeed wards, cocooned in a stage-within-a-stage kitted out like a theatrical dressing-room, comforts herself with binge-eating and looking at the property pages. The awful, grasping Family, the modern version of Brecht’s moralising bourgeois (played superbly by Filipe Manu, Egor Zhuravski, Dominic Sedgewick and Blaise Malaba) lounge about complacently, pointing the finger at everyone but themselves.
In the Songspiel, the action spills into the stalls, where the seats have vanished to make way for a spoiled Eden of patchy grass. The Family of the preceding piece have become puffed-up specimens of male vanity, who, under the sceptical gaze of Wake-edwards and the mezzosoprano Kseniia Nikolaieva, collapse into shrivelled husks, literally shirtless and trouser-less.
All this stimulates the mind, but it touches the heart too because the singers and wonderful orchestra under Michael Papadopoulos reveal the tender warmth beneath the brittle sarcasm of Weill’s score. Adding an extra touch of expressivity was the dancer Thomasin Gülgeç, especially in the Songspiel where his gyrations and mimings caught a sense of genuine human feeling throttled by sterile fantasies. If the evening has a star it’s him, but this is truly an ensemble evening everyone can be proud of.