Edinburgh International Festival review: Scottish Opera - The Telephone

Scottish Opera’s take on Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Telephone is the musical highlight of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, writes Ken Walton
The TelephoneThe Telephone
The Telephone

Scottish Opera - The Telephone *****

Written specifically for performance on American television in 1947, Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera miniature The Telephone has a natural place among those online performances supplanting the live experience at this year’s virtual Edinburgh International Festival. As such, and thanks to the lighthearted intimacy of Daisy Evans’ film direction for Scottish Opera, it is the absolute jewel of the You Tube musical content within the EIF’s “My Light Shines On” package.

It’s about the scourge of the telephone. Lucy (Soraya Mafi) arrives at Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre bar to meet with boyfriend Ben (Jonathan McGovern) before he heads off on a business trip. He aims to propose, but Lucy’s obsession with her phone - updated to a 21st century smartphone, with texting, Googling and selfies providing additional distractions - prevents the question being popped. Until, that is, he leaves and calls her from the pavement outside, on bended knee.

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There’s a delicious warmth about this film: close-ups that capture the couple’s genuine affection; muttered asides that amplify Ben’s exasperation; Lucy’s ultimate realisation when Ben disappears, not that her mobile obsession has got in the way, but that she genuinely adores him. The shifting camera focus directs the eye. The unity of creative purpose is never lost.

The piece itself is a musical gem, Menotti’s eclectic neo-classicism softened by a broad lyrical vocabulary, which Mafi shapes with conversational ease against McGovern’s rhapsodic forbearance. Under music director Stuart Stratford the Orchestra of Scottish Opera weaves an effortless soundtrack. Worth an Oscar.

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