Life Is a Dream – review

The unique Birmingham Opera Company is 25 years old this year. Its headline-grabbing anniversary production is sure to be the first complete performance of Stockhausen's Mittwoch aus Licht, due in August, but it's also celebrating with the premiere of a specially commissioned work from Jonathan Dove, who has been associated with director Graham Vick and his company since it began as City of Birmingham Touring Opera.

With a libretto by Alasdair Middleton, Dove's Life is a Dream is based upon the famous Spanish Golden Age play by Calderón de la Barca, about a king of Poland who incarcerates his son Segismund for 20 years because an oracle has prophesised that he will bring disaster to the country. When the son is finally released, he commits murder and rape, confirming the king's fears, and he's returned to prison, believing his day of freedom was just a dream. But when the people of Poland free him again and he is proclaimed king, Segismund decides that one must always strive to do the right thing.

Anyone who has seen previous BOC shows will recognise the style of Vick's production, with the audience wandering about a disused factory space, and the action, with its hordes of amateur chorus and acting extras, happening all around them. Yet for all its sense of a real community effort, such treatment does no favours at all to Dove's opera; words are indecipherable, and without a worthwhile synopsis in the programme the plot is impossible to follow. This kind of treatment may work with the authentically great operas – Fidelio, The Return of Ulysses, Don Giovanni, Othello – that Vick has directed in Birmingham before, but with an unfamiliar piece, it all starts to seem like a massive indulgence.

Dove's music is fluent, expertly written, especially for the chorus, and utterly unmemorable. Its basic idiom is somewhere between Britten and John Adams, but among the passing references to other composers there are far too many that recall a Les Misérables-style sentimentality.

All the performers, amateur and professional, work very hard, whether writhing about as inmates of an asylum, simulating rape and buggery, or being wheeled around on vast floats as the action moves from one part of the space to another. The main performances are strong, too – especially from Paul Nilon as the melancholy, cardigan-clad king, Eric Greene as the avenging son Segismund, Keel Watson as the jailor Clotaldo, and Wendy Dawn Thompson as his daughter Rosaura. William Lacey conducts, but he can't dispel the general air of disappointment; Life Is a Dream could be a perfect operatic subject, but this doesn't begin to measure up.