Welsh National Youth Opera has had fun with its new staging of Judith Weir’s The Black Spider, her first full-length opera, written in 1984 and conceived specifically for children. Yet, with its touches of humour as well as its slightly subversive punning and parodying of opera forms, there are appealing elements that can be enjoyed by anyone, though perhaps not arachnophobes.
It’s a good versus evil morality, in which Weir adapts and interweaves apparently separate narrative threads. One is based on Jeremias Gotthelf’s gothic retelling of a 15th-century tale set in Poland, where a plucky young woman, Christine, strikes a marriage bargain with a huntsman in order to save her fellow villagers from the oppression of their tyrannical feudal lord. The huntsman, however, is the Devil incarnate, whose toxic black-spider bite quickly poisons Christine before being transmitted to the rest of the village. The second story – told in dialogue – is the account of the opening of the tomb of King Casimir IV in the 1970s, in Krakow’s Wawel Cathedral, where – just as at the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun – the subsequent deaths of those who’d worked on the excavations seemed like the curses of the dead. Microbiological research would later identify the curse as the pathogenic aspergillus flavus, a biological time-bomb.
There is plenty of creepy, house-of-horror stuff here, both in the music’s moods and in director Rhian Hutchings’ and designer Bethany Seddon’s over-the-top approach; in the backdrop cartoon visuals the many black spiders have red eyes and a satanic leer and the occasional white spider is an arachnoid skull. But there is also a spooky frisson in the contemporary resonance of a mystery killer disease causing mayhem, unexplained by scientists, isolating the community, a blight on society. The company was scheduled to put this production on two years ago, but the onset of Covid-19 meant postponement. It takes on a weird topicality now.
A cast of youngsters with goth-style black makeup throw themselves unflinchingly into everything and the chorus, who as a corporate body portrayed the evil huntsman, were very well-schooled. Niceties of dialogue were not always adequately projected, but, among the solo singers, wearing head-mikes, some clearly promising bright sparks included Ffion Morgan Short’s Christine, Tomos Jones’s Count Heinrich, and Penelope George’s Herald. Dan Perkin conducted, with the eight-strong wind and percussion WNO ensemble bringing much style to the jaunty score. At around an hour, this is neither a grand affair nor long drawn-out, but done with such breezy enthusiasm as to carry a smiling audience along. And all with the high hopes of infecting a younger generation with a passion for opera.
