Where has the magic gone?
Royal Opera’s joyless adaptation of Coraline will struggle to enchant children or adults, says Rupert Christiansen
Only one unequivocally successful opera for children has been written over the past century, and that is Britten’s Noye’s Fludde. Significantly, it is designed for them to perform (in collaboration with adults), and that element of participation is something that sets it apart from the essentially passive experience that most other composers offer. But the genre poses many other challenges and pitfalls too, and I fear that in this new venture Mark-Anthony Turnage has failed to master any of the former.
Coraline started life in 2002 as an acclaimed novel by Neil Gaiman, and was adapted several years later into a hugely popular animated film by Henry Selick. It tells the story of an ordinary girl with pubescent anxieties who has just moved with her parents into a new house. Left alone to explore its possibilities, she finds a secret door into a parallel world that offers both temptations and perils of a gingerbread nature. Here, she outwits her predators and breaks evil enchantments in the process, before returning home feeling better about herself.
The plot follows an archetypal fairy-tale trope familiar from Alice’s Wonderland, CS Lewis’s Narnia, LFrank Baum’s Oz and so many others, while also incorporating some ghoulish violence from the Brothers Grimm and the heroic endeavours of Harry Potter’s crew. One might wonder whether Gaiman has been almost cynical in his combining of these tried and tested ingredients – but at the very least, the narrative and its personnel present a golden opportunity for music of vivid colours and rich atmosphere.
So it’s baffling that Turnage – a father of young children – has been so uninspired for this Royal Opera House co-production. His score is grey, sluggish and lacking in either charm or spookiness. A chamber orchestra is conventionally used and the vocal lines deliver barely a hint of a memorable tune. There is no strong dramatic climax, no sonic contrast between the two worlds, no sense of demonic fun or exciting danger.
Part of the problem is structural: instead of having distinct numbers interspersed with passages of spoken dialogue that can sharpen and modulate the pace, Turnage has used a continuum of opera-style recitative that would have any right-minded child wondering why the characters are neither talking nor singing. The net result is something that plods.
What on earth has happened to the composer of the electrifying Greek, the beautifully crafted Silver Tassie, the irresistibly vulgar Anna Nicole? Where did his gusto go, why has his edge been dulled? It’s all so joyless: this is music that splutters out like a damp firework – and that is no fault of the conductor Sian Edwards and the Britten Sinfonia in the pit.
Nor are the performances to blame. Mary Bevan does her level best to impersonate an 11-year-old girl, even if casting an adult soprano in the title role is neither visually convincing nor aurally persuasive. Kitty Whately stands out as Coraline’s real and mirror-world mother. Alexander Robin Baker is amiable as Coraline’s inventor father, Gillian Keith and Frances McCafferty do an over-the-top double act as two camp old actresses and Harry Nicoll has an engaging cameo as the obligatory eccentric elderly gentleman with a foreign accent. Denied the crutch of surtitles, they work very hard in the Barbican Theatre’s unresonant acoustic to articulate Rory Mullarkey’s libretto.
Director Aletta Collins has devised a fluent staging, designed with some ingenuity by Giles Cadle on what appears to be a limited budget. A couple of magical effects will not send anyone’s jaw dropping in an age saturated with CGI marvels and blockbuster fantasy musicals.
On the strength of the title, the production is sold out for its weeklong run, before moving on to Sweden, France, Germany and Australia. I very much doubt that the opera will be heard of thereafter. I knew the game was lost 10 minutes in, when a boy in front of me tugged at his father’s arm and whispered “I’ve really got to go to the loo”.