The Arcola’s seventeenth festival of genre-stretching opera kicked off with a delightfully accessible piece that not only took its audience on a four-century journey through the forest but also embodied the best bits of an oft-inaccessible art form
As I’m not the kind of person who was raised on traditional opera, knows much (if anything) about it, or might go far and away to seek it out, I thought that perhaps treating myself to some radical opera on a toasty, cloud-streaked July evening might be a bit more up my alley.
I was right.
The Grimeborn Festival at The Arcola Theatre – a tradition since its founding by Artistic Director Mehmet Ergen in 2007 – is a cheeky pun on the very posh, very traditional Glyndebourne Opera Festival. Only I didn’t have to go all the way to East Sussex to feel cultured. Instead, I rolled up to one of my favorite venues in East London and sat down for a casual evening that thoroughly piqued my latent opera curiosities.
I chose to watch TESTAMENT when I noticed that the company producing it, Green Opera, is known as an opera company and arts charity with sustainability at its core – a clue from the start that this was not going to be a stereotypical opera but rather, at the very least, an attempt to take the tradition and dip it in more relevant pools of political and social concern.
The show came together as an anthology of pieces – spanning four centuries of operatic work – that each, in their own ways, highlighted human relationships with the natural world. Beginning with Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624), then speeding ahead to Libby Larsen’s Try Me, Good King (2000), and ending with Leoš Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared (1921), each of the pieces offered something unique – and to different levels of effectiveness – to a contemporary exploration of human-environment relationships.
Ironically, the piece most difficult to place within the context of the evening’s theme was the most contemporary one: Try Me, Good King by Libby Larsen. Composed of five songs modeled after the gallows speeches and final letters of five of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, the piece was performed by masterful soprano Katherine McIndoe, whose nuanced work (she sang the last words of five historical women, one after the other!) shone through what ultimately became a confusing directorial choice, given the distant environmental threads of the show.
McIndoe thankfully took the stage again for the third and final piece of the evening, an excerpt from Leoš Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared. This was also the piece that made me very glad I’d come. At once extremely gentle and fiercely passionate, the story follows a village boy (Jan – played by Brenton Spiteri) who falls madly in love with a “gypsy girl” (Zefka – played by McIndoe) and abandons everything to live with her in the forest.
Billed as an “immersive” opera, TESTAMENT made a stunningly intimate moment out of this final story. The physical work was simple, yet powerful, and the words themselves drew the audience straight into the forest alongside them. Spiteri brought a delicate quiet and ease to his naive and passionate Jan that demonstrated a refreshing trust of the text and, more importantly, drove home the central theme of the show. Conjuring natural metaphor after natural metaphor to describe his internal journey, Spiteri’s Jan clarifies a story that may be more about the natural world and its cycles of birth and death, grief and joy, than either of its two main characters.
At one point, Jan looked up to the tall cavernous (even forest-like) space of the Arcola’s Studio 1 theatre and sang, “The smell of wheat blooming entices me into the darkness.” If the Grimeborn Festival is about making opera more accessible to theatregoers who might not feel they have the proper background to appreciate it or the interest to engage with it, TESTAMENT was, for lack of a better word, a testament to the core of that mission. Like Jan, I was very glad I’d come to the forest that evening.