Life is a Dream, at Argyle Works, Birmingham – Seven magazine review

Birmingham Opera Company’s adaptation of Calderon’s 1635 play is a Dream that's both good and bad

Wendy Dawn Thompson (Rosauro) & Eric Greene (Segismund) in Life is a Dream
Wendy Dawn Thompson (Rosauro) & Eric Greene (Segismund) in Life is a Dream Credit: Photo: Adrian Burrows

Life may not always look like much of a dream in Birmingham, but when it comes to visionary new operatic horizons, there is no other place to be. Celebrating its 25th birthday with the premiere of Life is a Dream, a new opera by the composer Jonathan Dove and librettist Alasdair Middleton, Birmingham Opera Company (BOC) brought together several strands of its unique work in a trademark show.

The familiar BOC ingredients were all there at Argyle Works, a chilly, cavernous warehouse on the city’s outskirts where promenading audience members mingled with, and sometimes bumped into, the cast. Making way at one moment for a solemn funeral procession, in the next you were likely to come across a car being washed or get uncomfortably close to scenes of sexual violence.

It’s all there in this contemporary adaptation of Calderón’s allegorical play about a king who imprisons his newborn son in response to an oracle’s dire prophecies, which are fulfilled when the prince finally gets a day of freedom.

An ideal operatic subject, perhaps, yet BOC’s dream proved illusory in places. Previous successes under the artistic direction of Graham Vick have derived from one-off versions of such masterpieces as Fidelio, Don Giovanni and Wozzeck; in August the company will give the belated premiere of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht.

But Dove’s community-opera style of writing, which embraces most idioms between Britten and Adams, never blazes single-mindedly enough to withstand such massive treatment, however fluently tailored it is to the contrasting needs of professional soloists and a huge amateur chorus.

Nor was the complicated plot clarified in Vick’s production, designed by Samal Blak and kept on the move by Ron Howell, though individual episodes packed a punch. Conducting from the centre of proceedings, William Lacey kept calm control, and the principals were strong – above all, an elemental Eric Greene as Segismundo, joined by such outstanding BOC regulars as Wendy Dawn Thompson, Paul Nilon and Keel Watson.

This review also appears in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph

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