P.Viktor

Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath

Last night I finally had the opportunity to check out the play Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath, which opened at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2007. The production has had so much praise heaped upon it, and being something of a Plathophile, I was intrigued and excited to see it. The play is based on the last ten seconds of Sylvia Plath’s life before she commits suicide, and indeed, when you walk into the small but intimate Burton-Taylor Studio, she is lying there with her head in the oven, waiting for the audience to be seated so that she can begin her suicidal monologue. The central character, called Esther Greenwood (the protagonist of Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar – a nice blurring of fact and fiction that Plath herself would have approved of) is played by the extraordinarily talented Elisabeth Gray, an Oxford English graduate, and is the only actor on stage.

The audience sits in the dark as we watch the almost too-brightly lit, too surreal last private moments of someone else’s life. Esther, readying herself for inevitable death (which always casts a long shadow over any Plath biography) realises her oven, called Olsen, can talk (surreally enough, but the premise is that she is hallucinating badly from the gas fumes, a condition called hypopoxia). It is through Olsen that she begins to reflect on her life, why she is a poet, what went wrong with her marriage, her roles as mother and daughter, and her desire to be the perfect housewife. One would immediately think that the play is dark and depressing, as much Plath biography tends to be, but there is a great amount of humour in this play, being completely irreverent and using the writer’s biography with wit, gentle mocking, and irony.

Britten - The Turn of the Screw | A Slow and Uneasy Turning

Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898) is perhaps one of my all time favourite ghost stories. I first studied it when reading English Literature, as it was included in a module on generic form and narrative experimentation (they don’t come much better than this novella). It was some years later that I picked it up again and truly relished the story and not long after I sought out the definitive film version, The Innocents (1961), which for all intents and purpose is a masterpiece of the ghost/horror genre. It was not long after that I became intrigued by Benjamin Britten's opera, so it was with pleasure that I attended a performance on Friday evening by the Oxford Opera Company at Hertford College Chapel, Oxford. I wasn't quite sure what to expect of this production, and not being familiar with Britten's work I went in with a very open mind.

I was not disappointed. The performances by all six cast members were excellent, but particularly the two ghosts, Adam Tunnicliffe as Peter Quint, whose interpretation of the domineering Quint was suitably chilling, and Katherine Cooper, whose wild haired Miss Jessel was genuinely horrifying and spine tinglingly creepy, her mezzo soprano voice perfectly guttural and eerie as that of a ghost. There were several genuinely unnerving moments in the opera - Miss Jessel suddenly appearing for the first time in a blood red dress, her face white and black hair wild and unkempt. Peter Quint's face appearing at an oval window, eerily lit. The children sleepwalking along the chapel aisle that made up the night garden. Quint's voice echoing up the stone staircase through the chapel’s organ loft as he called for Miles. The chilling scream of the young Miles as Quint extinguished a candle with his thumb and forefinger. The Governess' slow realisation that the boy was dead as he fell limp in her arms.

The chapel, although somewhat sparse, turned out to be the perfect venue for the opera. The story is set in Bly House, an old crumbling pile in Essex, and the chapel served as a dynamic space, becoming at times a long, spooky corridor, the altar doubling up as the children's schoolroom/nursery, the great height of the ceiling giving the impression of a large open hall, then appearing as a stately garden from which the organ loft served as a tower of the house. It was an incredibly innovative use of space, and the acoustics served the ghostly voices and dissonance of the orchestra perfectly - I think everyone was suitably uneasy by the end of the performance. Britten's wonderful music was at times lyrical, at times uneasy, at others violently dissonant, always building up the tension of the story. His interpretation of James' novella is full of lyricism and drama, and really gave the required atmosphere. All in all, this was a chilling interpretation of a modern classic, and gave one goose bumps for the rest of the evening.

The Turn of the Screw plays for two more evenings at Hertford, Wednesday 20 and Friday 22. Click here to book tickets.

Porgy and Bess

Trevor Nunn’s new version of Porgy and Bess has resurrected a long, difficult opera, and turned it into a modern day classic musical. Opening at the Savoy Theatre in London last November, it has had both critical and commercial success, and looks to have a long run both in London and on Broadway. At the cost of three million, and with exceptionally talented actors, the director has brought a little golden slice of 1930’s black America into cold and blue London.

Just about anyone knows some of the big tunes of this musical/opera. They could easily hum a few bars of Summertime, and at a push, I Love You Porgy, but they probably know little of the origins of these Gershwin songs, and probably know less about the story into which these songs are a part. That is probably because Porgy and Bess in its incarnation as a three hour long opera has not been widely performed, certainly not in the UK. It has enjoyed moderate success in America in the 1980s and early 90s, but other than that it has been widely ignored. Which is something of a shame, because it is a classic tale of love and redemption, with some show-stopping tunes and moments of awe, wonder and heartbreak.