Abergavenny Borough Theatre
Mid Wales Opera is like many other touring companies in scaling down for relatively small venues those works written to fill out bigger ones; but, unlike most of them, it has made an art and a virtue of miniaturisation.
Given reasonable parameters, most operas can be reduced to basics: with a few principal actors hurling voices into the auditorium or towards each other in episodes of grand intimacy, the rest – outside locations, crowd scenes, interior ballroom grandeur – can be imagined if not taken as read.
The crowds are probably the element most-missed, because they usually sing choruses. There’s one in the fuller version of MWO’s latest production of Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci. But once the audience has grown used to being close to what really matters, an opera’s often febrile nitty-gritty, it ceases to be a serious lack. In fact, the audience may here be said to become the missing chorus, mute in its response but partisan in its emotional involvement.
And therein lies MWO’s mastery of the art of reduction.
Being short to start with, I Pagliacci is traditionally paired with Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (‘Cav & Pag’) as a two-pronged illustration of verismo, the often violent depiction of street-level reality; West Side Story is a lengthier 20th-century example. But Leoncavallo’s opera is already, in its mise-en-scène, condensed to individual turmoil and angst from a noisy and peopled environment: the circus and its supporters.
Abergavenny’s Borough Theatre was full to the crossbeams for the penultimate stop on MWO’s SmallStages Autumn tour, by which time autumnal had become ice-cold wintry. I Pagliacci thus turned out to be the right choice for stoking the fires, especially as the cast of five – Robyn Lyn Evans (Canio), Elin Pritchard (Nedda), Philip Smith (Tonio), Johnny Herford (Silvio), and Sam Marston (Beppe) – gave it their all.
Giving their all is no small matter on the raised wooden dais garlanded by Bridget Wallbank’s coloured light bulbs and fronted by glistering, oyster-shell footlights. It’s an arrangement dictated by the need to be accommodated at different venues in which space has also to be made for the onstage quintet of musicians: Elenid Owen (violin), Nicola Pearce (cello), Peryn Clement-Evans (clarinet), Elfair Grug (harp), and musical director Jonathan Lyness (keyboard). Once again, Lyness’s reduction of Leoncavallo’s score was a masterpiece of compression, albeit sometimes up against it when the action on stage slipped the leash. It was balanced by director/designer Richard Studer’s astute English translation of Leoncavallo’s libretto which not only wears the livery of the original Italian in comfort but was delivered by the singers with ease and intelligibility, never a guarantee on the opera stage.
The virtue of classy reductions like MWO’s is that the audience doesn’t notice omissions. For example, in act one when Tonio turns nasty on being rebuffed by Nedda (a character who seems to attract lovers against her modest inclinations to reciprocate), the original text has her grabbing Beppe’s whip and lashing out at him; here, she strikes him with a beer bottle, which, in our imagination and her threatening gesture, has a jagged edge. Maybe it was me, but Smith’s Tonio seemed neither simple-minded nor handicapped, though in the original he describes himself as ‘warped and crooked’ (So ben che difforme contorto son io); maybe dragging himself about such a small set was unnecessary or too restricting. In any case, they are aspects of his character that have little dramatic point in an exercise like this one. Smith delivered a superbly animated prologue.
The singing was so good in the sense that there was no vocal weakness that might have affected the various interactions. At times, the small set was fairly bursting with song. Nedda’s first act ‘What a fire in his glance!’ (Qual fiamma avea nel guardo) and Canio’s famous ‘Perform the play…put on the costume (Recitar! …Vesti la giubba) celebrated the production as one whose core elements were distilled and powerful presences. Silvio was portrayed as vulnerable and Beppe as almost blameless in the tortuous goings-on.
The transformation of grubby reality into the commedia dell’arte play-within-a-play, and the reversal of that into real-life drama in costume is one of the great moments of opera, here underlined by the greasepaint already present on the faces of the characters, with its sinister black diamond eye symbolising the clown’s tragi-comedy and the work’s clashing temperaments.
As always with MWO, the production was an ensemble effort, the corps de théatre continued in the second half of the evening in cabaret items related to the masked comedy of the opera. It’s a customary move for the company when shorter operas more easily lend themselves to reductions in scale. The items ranged from Leoncavallo’s Mattinata and the Willkommen from Cabaret to Razzle Dazzle from Chicago and Pierrot’s Mein Sehnen from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, all conveyed by cast members with a passion that accelerated the pulse.
No-one even remotely interested could be unaware of MWO’s financial difficulties this year, ones that threatened its very survival. The company lost its Arts Council of Wales grant but has since managed to shore its immediate future with the help of funding from several sources, including massively from Powys County Council.
Richard Studer appeared on stage before the second half to outline the difficulties his company has experienced, the ways in which different providers have saved the day, and to appeal to audiences to continue supporting MWO and spreading the word about it. He was cheered with the sort of enthusiasm that must have sounded heartening.