This Other Eden

The following isn't a review as such; rather some general thoughts about the piece. 

I went to This Other Eden on Tuesday night at the Mayfair Theatre in Dunedin, (same place that Grimhilda! was presented at in 2012). This is Anthony Ritchie's new opera, and what a marvellous piece it is. The music is complex and rich and full of detail, and yet is accessible at first hearing, accessible enough to make you feel you're getting to grips with it without straining your brain too much. It has wonderful emotion, and a frequent use of motifs, echoings, and all sorts of other musical mechanisms that make it available to your ear.

The libretto is by Michelanne Forster, and is derived from a play of the same name that she wrote eighteen years ago. The story focuses on Thomas Kendall, an early missionary to New Zealand (he was a contemporary of Samuel Marsden, who also appears in the opera). Kendall was the man who produced the first Maori/English dictionary. The story is in part told by his wife Jane, an unfortunate woman who had to take second place not only to the making of the dictionary and the machinations of the tough Maori chief, Hongi Hika, but later to the Maori common-law wife Kendall took. Jane is the emotional heart of the opera, and was played by Elizabeth Mandeno, who sang with such beauty and purity of tone that her mere singing moved you, quite apart from what was happening to the character.

Kendall was played by James Rodgers, who has a notable list of achievements as a singer, performing both in his native country of New Zealand and abroad. His strong tenor brought great strength to the part - a long and difficult one - though early in the performance he seemed to be momentarily struggling a little with his upper register. Thankfully this didn't cause any issues and for the rest of the evening he was in fine form. Kendall is presented as an ambiguous character, torn between his work and the missionary society's aims, his desire to understand the Maori people and his reluctance to provide them with muskets in order to learn more about them, and finally between the two women in his life.

Joel Amosa played Hongi Hika with great force of personality and a considerable physical presence. His singing was rich and strong; a formidable character altogether.

A number of years ago I was the musical director for a group called Opera Alive. This consisted of talented young singers from around the town; the group had originally been formed to give these singers experience in the theatre and in performance. It had already been running for three or four years when I took over at short notice because their musical director had to leave Dunedin (her husband had got a job in the North Island), and I was with them for five or six years after that, I think. The group changed from year to year: some stalwarts remained throughout most of the entire time I was involved, but others might only stay a year.

James Adams was one of those involved with Opera Alive; in Ritchie's opera he played Samuel Marsden, the strong-minded missionary who made a considerable impact on early NZ society. He doubled this role with that of King George IV. The King only appeared in one scene, the funniest in the opera both in terms of libretto and music. It was great to see James singing so powerfully and performing so well. He always had plenty of talent, of course, but it's still good to see his progress in his career. James has apparently moved back to Dunedin with his family. Hopefully he'll have the opportunity to carry on singing from his home base.

Matt Landreth played the smaller role of Richard Stockwell, a man who falls in love with Jane Kendall, and gets her pregnant while her husband is away. Stockwell was the Kendall family's servant, and his actions in the story are relatively true to history. Landreth brought considerable presence to the character, who could have been treated unsympathetically. Stockwell's relationship with Jane had truth about it, and though it brought them both grief, was perhaps more true in some ways that Kendall's own relationship with his wife. Certainly Kendall, in the story, treats her badly, and leaves her behind in New Zealand to fend for herself while he goes back to London for a year, much to her anger and sorrow.

The rest of the relatively young cast did well; vocally there were no weak areas, and the small chorus in particular contributed strongly to the piece.

The director, Jacqueline Coats, chose to use a raked stage, which to me always has potential for accidents. I remember years ago that when the NZ Opera Company toured the opera Il Trovatore, they performed it on a raked stage (from memory it was more raked than this one) and one of the chorus told me that they were afraid every night when they came racing onto it that one of them would fall and break something. Though there are advantages in this production with having a raked stage - people can stand above others, and there is the neat way in which people climb up onto it at the back - but it seems to me that it's hard on the performers, who spend a good deal of time climbing up and descending. Hard on the leg muscles, I'd think, and requiring that much extra caution in terms of keeping your balance. James Adams does a spectacular fall from the top to the bottom at one point, so it has advantages in that dramatic sense too!

Tecwyn Evans, the very well-known NZ conductor (he was raised in Dunedin) was in charge of the orchestra of ten players, and how wonderfully they played! As far as I know they're mostly local musicians, but the level of playing was excellent. I noted that Ralph Miller played the trumpet part (a considerable one with some degree of virtuosity, and requiring a great deal of clarity). I've known Ralph on and off for a number of years because he's been involved with various brass bands around town as a cornet player. I've played for him in the past, and last year he did a couple of beautiful solos at a concert where I was the accompanist.

And while I'm dropping names, Linda Brewster, a friend from a very long way back, was doing her first job for Dunedin Opera, as Stage Manager. Plainly she did a very good job, because everything worked like tickety boo. And finally Ryan Walker is listed as 'Audio Visual Technician.' He happened to be doing a similar job (though with a less fancy title) on Hamp. 

Charles Dickens - a life

I finished Claire Tomalin's magnificent Charles Dickens, a life, last night.  Magnificent primarily in the amount of sheer detail that's provided, and which must have taken vast hours of research to put together.  The book deals with the whole Nelly Ternan saga with considerable insight, and manages to take the cover off some of the matters that had been hidden for many years.  It helps that Tomalin has already worked over this particular bit of ground before, in her book, The Invisible Woman: the story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. 

Dickens, as is generally well-known, was a great mix of a man - hardly unusual, especially in those who can be classed as geniuses - but there are aspects of his life that are puzzling to say the least.  His rejection of his wife, Catherine, after they had had ten children together, and his negative attitude to most of his sons whom he regarded with less and less favour as they grew and proved to be not geniuses like their father, are more than sad, and these attitudes lost him some friendships completely and curtailed others.  His favouring of his daughters and his two sisters-in-law was also curious, given that he spent a great deal of his adult life in the company of other men, behaving like a unattached bachelor.

While he could be harsh on members of his family, or contrary, or dismissive, he formed friendships with some males that endured through all manner of ups and downs.  Forster is the prime example; he could upset Dickens, but never for long, and Forster himself could be hurt by Dickens, but always came back for more.

Then there was the way he drove himself constantly.  Some of this might be attributed to his upbringing by a father who couldn't keep out of debt and Dickens' sense that if he didn't work hard enough he might end up in poverty like the old man. Yet that can only be part of the reason: the incredible walks (twelve miles was nothing, and sometimes he walked through the night from one place to another); the endurance tests of the public readings which increased his ill-health; the striving to do several things at once and managing to do so 99 times out of 100; the insistence on taking on far more than the ordinary mortal could manage; the restlessness of shifting houses and even countries; his self-assurance that he could cure people by what can only be regarded as approaches verging on quackery; and on and on.

But then there was the other side of Dickens: the generous, compassionate, public-spirited man, the man who genuinely cared for the poor (he might have been more sympathetic to his family if they had been poor!), the man who financially supported the widows and fatherless children of old friends, who paid off his father's debts - and those of his siblings - time and again even though it made him angry; the man who fought those who dismissed the poor as being beneath their contempt; the man who mocked the legal systems and brought changes through his writings; the man who celebrated life continually with endless birthday parties, Christmas parties, dinners for friends, dinners for other writers and men (sometimes women) of renown, jaunts hither and thither and yon; the man who fell passionately in love not only with the woman he didn't marry in his youth, but with his sister-in-law, with other lesser-known women and, finally, with Ellen Ternan.  Only one of these relationships ever became a sexual one (Ternan's) but there was more passion in the other relationships than many men have in their whole lives.

And then of course there was the writing: it could make him ill at times, could drive him mad, and sometimes he was troubled that it wasn't good enough.  He could write two novels at one time, and besides the works for which he is famous, he wrote countless other pieces: stories, articles, plays and tirades.  His Christmas stories almost all sold on the basis of the one really excellent one, A Christmas Carol; some of them weren't very good, and the ones he wrote late in his life were pretty awful.  He could write scenes that were pure melodrama, and scenes in which the women behave in the way they would on the stage (acting and stage directing and playwriting were all fitted into his frenetic life) but not in real life (or even in a novel), and he could write scenes that hummed along and couldn't be put down by the reader.  Some of his characters were pure sentiment, some were pure evil.  His best female characters were never heroines, or children, or young girls - all of these suffered from overwrought writing and bland characterization.  Some of his heroes weren't much better, but the best of them are real in a way only characters written by a master craftsman are real.

Besides these, there were the host of people who really do stick in our memories, and they are so many that to name them would take pages.  Not only are there the famous ones who are so well-known that they might have been real people, there are the innumerable characters who appear for a few sentences and still come completely alive.

I've read more than one book on Dickens and his life, but this one seemed more balanced and honest.  Furthermore it gave other people in the story room to breathe.