Easy to forget that the American dream – the phrase dates from 1931 – was originally a quest for liberty and equality, not cars, washing machines and refrigerators. By the time Leonard Bernstein wrote his one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti (1952), mod cons had pushed lofty ideals out of the way. The sweet suburban life of Sam and Dinah, the married couple in the opera, “looks” like domestic bliss but feels awful, as Bernstein’s own libretto puts it. Opening the Linbury theatre’s new season, in a stylish and probing staging by Oliver Mears, conducted by Nicholas Chalmers, Trouble in Tahiti is paired with its more cumbersome sequel, A Quiet Place (1983). Both are in orchestrations, reduced and adapted, by Garth Edwin Sunderland, sparklingly played by unnamed soloists from the Royal Opera orchestra.
With a nod to Kurt Weill, and paving the way for his own Candide and West Side Story, soon to follow, Trouble in Tahiti had already established Bernstein’s distinctive flair. He embraced jazz harmonies, shoo-be-doo scat singing for the commentating trio (oddly amplified here but well sung) and colloquial dialogue. Sam and Dinah have everything, including affluence, psychiatrist, milliner, superior attitudes and an obedient child, Junior, who sees all but says nothing. Only happiness is absent. In one version of the text (Bernstein wrestled with the work), Dinah asks: “You call this a life? Day after day of the same humiliation. Day after day with no consideration of what it means to be a woman.”
As both parody and indictment of mid-20th-century marriage, Trouble in Tahiti is bittersweet. To an audience today, the fantasy of a “little white house” (“Parks for the kids, neighbourly butchers, less than an hour by train!”) holds a piteous and elusive nostalgia. For Bernstein it was the here and now. He based some of the story on aspects of his own parents’ unhappy marriage and started writing the work, less than tactfully, on his honeymoon. Very little happens in this one day of Sam and Dinah’s life. They pursue their selfish loneliness and secret longings: movie-going (the title is that of a fictitious film), work, shopping, drinking, muscle-building. Inconceivably, they fail in their only important job: to attend their son’s school play.
As Dinah, the Irish-Canadian mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta (who played the same role in Opera North’s memorable production) excelled, musically versatile, physically daring and energetic. Sam, clean-cut and coldly handsome in business uniform flannel suit, is at once ambitious and a pathetic cipher, this enigmatic mix suggested deftly by the British baritone Henry Neill.
A Quiet Place, written towards the end of Bernstein’s life and set 30 years later, is an overlong theatrical dud. This is no reflection on those involved, who performed every aspect to the highest level. Their commitment makes it worth seeing, not least for historical interest. The wordy text is by Stephen Wadsworth, the music a thorny, dissonant departure. If only Bernstein were alive to have another shot at it. (His wholesale revision, incorporating A Quiet Place into Trouble in Tahiti, occasionally staged, still left problems.)
The first act is an agonising and unconvincing funeral scene – Dinah has died, intimated as suicide, in a car crash. In Annemarie Woods’s unfussy and elegant designs, a sleek, black Rolls-Royce of a coffin sits, centre stage, in the funeral home. You can almost smell the embalming fluid. The older Sam, excellently interpreted by Grant Doyle, stands apart, silent throughout, looking furious. Lugubrious scenes of post-death clearing, misunderstanding and reconciliation follow. It is almost, but not quite, moving. Neill returns, brilliantly, as the grown-up Junior, prone to undressing at untimely moments – namely his mother’s funeral. He now has a sister, Dede (the adroit and touching Rowan Pierce). Elgan Llŷr Thomas, admirable as the thinly characterised but pivotal François, and Nick Pritchard as the smarmy funeral director, lead the skilful ensemble cast.
English National Opera’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954), directed and designed by Isabella Bywater, is musically outstanding and looks striking. The “but” comes in the overladen backstory, invented to give further bafflement to Henry James’s enigmatic novella on which the opera is based. Britten’s taut work is robust, and survives the removal to a 50s-style psychiatric hospital in which the Governess, who may or may not see ghosts, is confined. Much of the ambiguity evaporates, with nurses gliding around writing reports and a doctor ushering his deluded patient back to bed.
The score, admirably played by 13 ENO musicians and conducted by Duncan Ward in a first-rate ENO debut, remains startling, disturbingly intact. Elaborate projections, designed by Jon Driscoll, take us into the upstairs-downstairs world of Bly Manor, now a queasy, swirling flashback. The Governess’s charges, Flora (Viktoria Nekhaenko) and Miles (Jerry Louth), appear to be in thrall to the late Peter Quint (Robert Murray) and his unwilling consort, Miss Jessel (Eleanor Dennis). Who knows what the housekeeper Mrs Grose (Gweneth Ann Rand) really thinks. With fine performances all round, and a stellar reading of the Governess by Ailish Tynan, who managed to charm despite ghastly wig, peach cardigan and fluffy, hospital-garb slippers, ENO is on fighting form.
The Sinfonia of London and star conductor John Wilson would have earned their colours in the first half of their Barbican concert alone: a glitter of extrovert wit from Kenneth Hesketh’s PatterSongs (2008); and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 2, not so often played in the concert hall, here performed by Sheku Kanneh-Mason. Supported by the quick-witted players, the cellist traversed every mood from poetic to jaunty to lyrical to fiery. What then followed, Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 1, was at once prodigious and flummoxing. How could a work so familiar – I am supposed to have half an idea about Rachmaninov – sound so wild, unfamiliar, revolutionary. These vigorous musicians almost launched themselves into the air as they played. Wilson himself, mostly economical in gesture, occasionally snaked into a bent-knee shimmy. If you were under the impression that classical music is staid, try this lot.
Star ratings (out of five)
Trouble in Tahiti/ A Quiet Place ★★★★
The Turn of the Screw ★★★★
Sinfonia of London ★★★★★
Trouble in Tahiti + A Quiet Place are at the Linbury theatre, London, until 24 October
The Turn of the Screw is at the Coliseum, London, until 31 October
