Gawain, Barbican, review: 'heroically intense'

The sight of a severed head continuing to sing must surely be one of the Royal Opera’s greatest coups de théâtre. That was in 1991 at the premiere of Gawain, the opera by David Harsent and Harrison Birtwistle. That wasn’t the only striking image. As Gawain journeys North for his second encounter with the Green Knight (having parted the Green Knight’s head from his shoulders, he must now offer his own) the two treacherous ladies of the Arthurian court look down sneeringly on his progress like two malevolent scarecrows. A livid green like verdigris suffused everything.

This performance on the Barbican Hall’s stage could hardly match that, heroically intense and committed though it was on the musical level. At the back, the Green Knight (John Tomlinson, revisiting the role he created 23 years ago) appeared in a doorway at the back above the percussion of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, in a flood of green light and dry ice. The complacent and terrified member of Arthur’s court gaped at him from the front of the stage, in a space that wasn't big enought to swing a cat let alone a sword. In a minimal dumb show, the action was sketched in by the singers: the riddling games, the decapitation, Gawain’s ritual washing before his journey Northwards to find the Green Knight (now with his head mysteriously restored), his seduction en route by Lady de Hautdesert (one of the above-mentioned scarecrows).

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All this one could accept. Birtwistle likes minimalist theatre, as his earlier works like Bow Down prove. The problem here (apart from the terrible costumes) is that in this opera, Birtwistle has left the sharp-edged concision of his early music-theatre pieces far behind. The sound of the orchestra is relentlessly heavy and complex. The titanic brass eruptions, percussion explosions and hammered string patterns keep whipping themselves into climaxes, which disperse in a sullen haze. But like the famous geyser in Yellowstone Park, you know this is only a pause before another titanic outburst.

This full-dress aural onslaught demands either a full-dress staging to match it, or none at all. A half-way house won’t do. Plus there’s the simple difficulty for the singers of making themselves heard. One felt their discomfort, and as the music heaved itself towards yet another shattering climax, one shared it too.

The two singers who won the battle, appropriately enough, were Leigh Melrose as Gawain and Tomlinson who was simply magnificent. He actually managed to bring some subtlety to the role, despite the constant pressure to sing at shouting pitch. But despite the passing beauties, such as the three-fold seduction scene, it’s hard not to resent a work which bullies one into submission.

In any case this quality of onslaught strikes at the heart of the work itself. We’re asked to believe that Gawain experiences a kind of ethical awakening after all his travails. “I’m not that hero,” he sings, but the fact that he keeps singing it, in response to the dumbly repeated promptings of the Court, suggests that he and they are merely the puppets of the music’s relentless formalism. It simply rolls on, obeying its own blind impulses, as oblivious to the characters it engulfs as a tsunami.

Hear this concert on the BBC iPlayer until May 23

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