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Shadow of a gun London
Coliseum
02/16/2000 - and 19, 24, 26, 29 February, 3 March 2000
Mark-Anthony Turnage The Silver Tassie
Gerald Finley (Harry Heegan), John Graham Hall (Sylvester), Anne Howells
(Mrs Heegan), Sarah Connolly (Susie), Vivian Tierney (Mrs Foran), David
Kempster (Teddy), Leslie John Flanagan (Barney), Mary Hegarty (Jessie),
Mark Le Brocq (Dr Maxwell), Gwynne Howell (The Croucher), Bradley Daley
(Staff Officer), Jozik Koc (Corporal)
English National Opera Chorus (men's voices), English National Opera Orchestra
Paul Daniel (conductor), Bill Bryden (director) The ENO's programme for Mark-Anthony Turnage's new opera (which has a
libretto adapted by Amanda Holden from Sean O'Casey's play) includes quotes
from the officer-class war poets Siegfried Sasson and Wilfred Owen. But the
action is focused on Harry Heegan, a working-class Dublin athlete. The
music and language in the first instance are those of his friends, and of
the generality of working-class British soldiers in the trenches. And
Turnage's sense of drama is informed by the cinema and television, and by
jazz sets and rock concerts, rather than by traditional theatrical
rhetoric.
Turnage and Holden's four act structure is intricately and symmetrically
structured and tightly controlled, packing a mass of realistic and symbolic
ideas into a two-hour work that never flags. The four acts can be seen as
symphonic in form: a first act with two themes that are stated and
intertwined, a slow expressionist second act, a dark and frantic third act
and a final act that consists of a medley of dance forms and dramatic
gesture. But by breaking the first act at Harry's entrance and trimming a
little, the opera would make an effective old-fashioned five-act
ninety-minute movie.
There's some common ground with Turnage's first opera Greek in the
pleasure in vernacular wit, sporting rhythms and popular music and the
irresistable combination of originality and dramatic directness in the
music. But there's a serious and moving use of traditional Irish and
Scottish songs, and less direct humour in the word setting. For example,
Susie the irritatingly pious neighbour repeats the phrase "God is watching
you" at every opportunity during most of the first act. But Turnage plays
it for laughs a lot less than you might expect from reading the libretto.
And there's no tragi-comic excess, and little low humour, in the central
story of Harry Heegan's physical and moral destruction by the war.
Harry, home on leave from the war, returns to his parents' home with a
silver cup his team has won at football. He celebrates with his friend
Barney and fiancée Jessie, then leaves for the war with Barney and
the wife-beating upstairs neighbour Teddy. The three men merge into the
mass of soldiers in the second act, who fear death and ache from boredom
and alienation. After the war, Harry is paralysed from the waist down in
hospital, and Jessie is now with Barney, who has a VC for saving Harry's
life. Teddy is also blind, and totally dependent on his wife. At a dance in
the final act, Harry breaks down with bitterness and hurls the cup to the
ground as Jessie and Barney dance.
The director Bill Bryden was involved in the work from early on, and it was
workshopped extensively. The results in terms of the depth of the
performances, matching the cinematic quality of the drama and music, are
outstanding. Gerald Finley's central performance as Harry, euphoric jock in
the first act, bitter wreck in the third and barely relieved in his
suffering by his outburst in the last act, was towering, physically
wrenching at times. His singing of the title air, by Robert Burns, was
heartbreaking in the first act, but his cracked fragments of song in the
later acts were even more so. Paul Kempster as Teddy, the bully reduced to
dependency was almost as powerful, beginning loathesome and ending a tragic
match for Harry, both of them incomplete. Their shared hymn in the act,
praying for what they'd each lost and could not get back, was almost
unbearably moving. Gwynne Howell as the Croucher, the mysterious watcher in
act two who quotes Scripture ironically over the men in the trenches and
musically at least takes the place of Harry in this act, was also deeply
expressive, though his voice is all shot away.
In a rich ensemble cast, John Graham Hall, always a brilliant character
actor, made Sylvester, Harry's proud and decent but ineffectual dad, into a
sadly comic old geezer far from simple caricature, Vivian Tierney also got
completely inside Mrs Foran, Teddy's wife who walks into door but survives
somehow. Sarah Connolly had a powerful presence as Susie, the religious
girl from downstairs who initially fancies Harry but who becomes a nurse
and pairs off casually with a cynical doctor, spurning the damaged Harry.
The characterization of Susie seems less rich than the others -- both her
religious obsessiona and her flirting iwth the doctor are monotone --
though she is thematically important in reflecting the transformation of
conventional morality by the war.
The set in the first two acts was arranged around a big gun (a larger than
lifesize copy of a real first world war gun). The Croucher and the chorus
sat silently at the back during the first act, behind Harry's parents' home
constructed of flimsy flats, and moved into life as the gun turned round to
reveal what it was. The soldiers in the second act formed solid blocks,
reflecting their repetitive music, which is somewhat similar to the
sailor's chorus ("This is the moment") in Billy Budd. The hospital
and dance hall were also very simple flats with basic furniture, which
highlighted the enormity of the set with the gun.
The ENO's last commission, Dr Ox's Experiment went down well with
clubbers but not with more traditional opera audiences. The Met's "modern
classic" commission this year, The Great Gatsby managed to be too
conventional for critics and too modern for the Met's core audience.
Turnage, who says he hates opera on the whole, has produced a work that is
a classic in the sense of being impeccably balanced and serious, but which
is emotionally direct and accessible to a wide range of audiences. Although
only schedule for six performances at the ENO this season, this one will
stay in the repertoire.
The Silver Tassie is a co-production with Dallas Opera. The ENO
performances on 29 February and 3 March are being recorded for BBC
television, to be broadcast at a later date.
H.E. Elsom
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