St Pancras – the perfect place to catch an opera
Lost & Found Royal Opera, St Pancras station
Wearing a high-vis tabard, one singer was mistaken for station staff by an irked traveller
★★★★★
The comedian Frank Skinner talks of his disdain for the “oppressive twelfths” in our daily schedules, ie our compulsion to arrange appointments for times that end with a five or a zero. As an opera fan, he might approve of Lost & Found, a series of seven new micro-operas produced by the Royal Opera House, which opened at the Eurostar arrivals area in St Pancras at 10:46 on Tuesday. The idiosyncratic timing was to avoid clashes with PA announcements – just one of a number of challenges performers were up against in these intimate vignettes, performed at various locations around the station to mark International Women’s Day.
Created by female composer and librettist teams, the compact operas – all lasting just a few minutes – were based on train-travel anecdotes submitted to the ROH by members of the public, as part of the Europalia Trains & Tracks Festival. The most successful were those that explicitly used St Pancras as the setting, such as
It’s the Little Things, in which two commuters are reconnected after lockdown restrictions.
A man clutching Virginia Woolf ’s
Orlando – his place bookmarked by an old ticket – recognises a fellow passenger. “I used to see you knitting,” he remembers. “Did you finish that sock?” They both appreciate the station anew, gazing towards its glass ceiling and fine brickwork; the audience, standing mere metres away, instinctively does the same. In
Mini-break, the main duet references
I Want My Time With You, the Tracey Emin installation that hangs directly below the station clock, while The Parting Place – set underneath Paul Day’s enormous entwined couple – features a tour group passing through St Pancras.
Siân Dicker’s rich spinto soprano and engaging presence draws in passersby. A school party stops by The Meeting Place sculpture to listen – the lover’s tiff topic isn’t particularly age-appropriate, but that doesn’t matter. Later, outside Starbucks, under the departures board, I move aside for the same wide-eyed students; the teacher has sensibly decided that opera is a worthy reason to delay their journey. Few so-called outreach projects have the impact of Lost & Found, and the social media buzz won’t do the Royal Opera House any harm either: for better or worse, these performances – repeated by two casts throughout the day – were largely watched through tiny screens.
St Pancras is no stranger to impromptu performances. The public pianos are “bach”, according to signs, after a period of pandemic-induced silence. Pianist Erika Gundesen, joined by musicians from Belgium’s Casco Phil chamber orchestra, demonstrated that the battle-scarred Rogers upright can handle more than a stilted Für Elise. Instrumentation varied across the operas, from the pared-back Detritus scored for violin and bass only, to the thicker The Hardest Journey, which includes flute, clarinets, French horn and a variety of vocalisations.
On occasion, the immersive aspects were almost too convincing: wearing a high-vis tabard and sweeping the floor as he got into character for Detritus, bass Jamie Woollard was mistaken for station staff by one irked traveller. The site-specific nature of this series was its strength but, as the work doesn’t translate easily, securing a second performance could be complex. According to recent research, female creatives tend to be better represented in contemporary opera; however, because these works are invariably less likely to be revived than established classics, it remains difficult to achieve lasting impact.
Lost & Found deserves another outing: it’s first class.