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. 

The Bean Trees [and The Poisonwood Bible]

While staying at a friend's house I came across a book called The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. I'd heard of her as the author of The Poisonwood Bible, a book I haven't read, but that was all. Anyway it turns out that the Bean Trees is her first book and probably rather different to the later more serious Poisonwood.  By all accounts Bean Trees is a good deal funnier, I suspect, from what I know of the story of the late book. Kingsolver's wit and humorous way with words sparks off every page. In fact the humour is pretty much what holds things in place, because there's only a minimal story, and there are times, especially later in the book, when it feels as though she's being quite didactic in telling us what she knows about the Arizona countryside, even though it may be interesting.  Her characters are strongly written, and often quite quirky, but they don't really get a lot to do apart from having conversations and picnics with each other. The attraction between Taylor, the young woman who finds herself landed with an unwanted child in the middle of the Oklahoma flatlands, and the married school teacher from Guatemala, barely smoulders; there's little real suspense in regard to the subplot about rescuing illegal immigrants, and the child abuse motif that lingers in the background isn't deeply explored. Indeed the climax of the book is more of a way of resolving Taylor's issues with caring for the child she's had foisted on her than with any concerns about whether the couple from Guatamala will get away from the authorities, or whether she'll be allowed to keep the child.

For all that, the book is very readable, and Kingsolver's eye on the world is unique and regularly shows us familiar things in startling ways. Her two main characters (the other one is a married woman whose husband has left and who is always on the verge of divorce but never quite getting there) both have a bit of a learning trajectory, but there's not much in the plot itself to push them towards real change. They somehow manage it on their own, as it were.

Lots of homespun wisdom - some of it hilariously suspect - lots of grumpy old women, some weird children, some strange locations. Not quite enough for a book to have real impact but certainly a book with a particular voice that's worth hearing.

I've now read The Poisonwood Bible. Here's the review I posted on Goodreads in April 2014

This is a brilliant book about a clash of cultures, spiritual viewpoints and personalities...until around page 450 (out of 600) when it begins to sashay into a book about how awful American culture is and how interfering American politicians are in world affairs. Those two last aspects have a degree of truth, but they aren't what the book is truly about. They've been implied throughout, but when they take centre stage they distract from what is going on in the real lives of the characters. I found the last hundred pages went nowhere for me: the chief antagonist of the book, the father, had disappeared from the centre of the story, and was replaced by invisible male antagonists at a distance, both Congolese and American. I finished up skimming those hundred pages because they merely detailed more of the three girls' lives and took the story nowhere.

There are many wonderful things in the book: the different voices of the five females, the detail of Congolese village life and the Congo itself, the host of minor characters. The father, who, unlike the five females, never gets to speak for himself but is only seen through the women's eyes, still manages to be a huge force to be reckoned with in the story. Once he's gone, however, the story has no centre anymore. Like him or not, (and he's almost impossible to like) he is the character against whom the women play out their lives, since they don't particularly get on with each other. After the big climax around page 400 or so, he remains offstage, and we only hear about him in passing. His death (still offstage) while it may be justifiable in terms of 'balance,' seems contrived. 

Christian mission plays a huge part in the story (and then this aspect gets lost as the politics take over). I've recently been re-reading Vincent Donovan's Christianity Rediscovered, a book about a Catholic priest who has to rethink his own cultural viewpoints in order to convey the essence of the Gospel to the Masai, and does so successfully. The father in The Poisonwood Bible, for all his vitality, never understands that his cultural view of Christianity is making him miss the mark in trying to convey Jesus to the Congolese. There are other Christians in the story who have better managed to integrate Christianity into the Congolese culture, though they play a relatively minor role. Kingsolver writes rather ambiguously about the Christian aspect of the story: we can see that the father hasn't got it right, but only occasionally do other members of his family get it right themselves.

This is certainly a book that keeps you thinking about it, so I guess that makes it successful!

What I was doing in Christchurch

I've been in Christchurch for the last five or six days (arrived there last Tuesday, around tea-time, and left Sunday lunchtime).  Christchurch, site of New Zealand's most famous earthquakes, considerably outranking the huge ones that flattened the smaller city of Napier back in the thirties.

I didn't go into central Christchurch, an area I previously knew better than anywhere else in the city, because I couldn't bear to see live what I'd already seen on television: the devastation of fine heritage buildings would have been more than I wanted to handle, I think.  Apart from that, I didn't have any real time to go exploring, or sightseeing.  The area I was working in had enough of its own visual demonstration of the effects of the earthquake: a suburban area on the East side of the city where much of the worst damage happened.  Houses here have been demolished completely, are due to be demolished, are boarded up, have boards up to protect them until they're repaired, have wonky paths and driveways, and are situated on streets where your car's suspension is likely to get a hammering.  In fact, the roads are one of the most obvious factors in terms of gauging the city's overall damage: everywhere you go there are roadworks, and changes being made to the layout of roads, and this constant feeling that you're going over a lot more bumps than you're used to.

When you go inside the houses, even the ones that look okay, you see the cracks in the plaster, the corners where wallpaper and plaster has pulled away, the gaps between ceilings and walls, the floors that aren't quite flat.  We were in St Ambrose's Anglican Church yesterday for a service: the building itself doesn't seem too bad - at least not to look at - but the floor is all over the place.  Our base during the week was Parklands Baptist Church, and again, while the building seems pretty much okay, there's a  fair amount of taping up of large cracks in the flooring.

To my great relief, we didn't have any tremors while we were there.   People are still on edge, however; they've more than once got to the point where they've thought quakes and tremors had come to a standstill, only to have another large quake, the sort that's big enough to upset you all over again, bring back all the tensions and fears.

I went up to ChCh with a team of 12 other people from our church, Dunedin City Baptist.  The church has done these local mission trips before in a variety of places, including our home town, and while the leader has remained the same for all of them (they happen once or twice a year), the remainder of the team varies considerably from trip to trip.  They almost always stay in a hall connected to the local church they're working with, and they cook meals together and have prayer times together and 'debriefings.'  They go out in pairs, usually, knocking on doors and asking if the people would be willing to answer a few questions on a survey.  Being a Christian group, the survey naturally leads onto discussing what people feel about church, and about Jesus.  But that's only part of it: they're also looking out for people in need within the area, and once these needs are identified, the local church follows up and does their best to alleviate the situation.  In the process, of course, it makes contact with the people and hopefully they feel comfortable enough with these church people to want to get to know them better.

Of course it has an evangelistic bent; there are enough plain social workers out there without us primarily doing social work as well (although it was the church that began 'social work' to a great extent, two millennia ago.

This trip, however, had a number of differences: firstly we were going to a church that had already done a great deal of door-knocking.  Secondly the door-knocking in question was primarily to find out how people were doing as a result of the ongoing earthquakes, and to put them in touch with people and organisations who could assist them further.  The group overseeing our visit, CCR (Christchurch Community Response) has been up and running for some time, and has a good relationship with groups like the Red Cross.  It has a number of volunteers who are able to assist more quickly than some of the bigger, more official organisations, as well.

Thirdly we were there to help out CCR (it doesn't stand for Creedence Clearwater Revival, or Revisited, by the way) in any way we could.  So, on and off for two days we did door-knocking, and completed some of the streets that CCR wanted covered.  We also assisted at St Ambrose's in such tasks as dropping off free firewood, or taking round care packs and such.  On top of this two of our team got themselves into Bake-a-thon mode, and not only gave away a good deal of the baking we'd brought up from Dunedin, baking that was intended to be part of our in-house food, they made a great deal more and gave that away too.

In fact giving things away was a delight: the leader and I, on Friday morning, went round one long street giving away some sixty fleecy blankets, the sort that you wrap around yourself if you're watching TV, or reading a book in your chair.  The Warehouse used to sell them a great deal, and may still do so.  The sixty blankets we gave away had been donated to the CCR people, but no one had had time to dispose of them.  So we walked from house to the next, and wherever people were home, gave the blankets a new home.  There's nothing quite like someone knocking at your door and asking if you want something free, something which is obviously of use to you.  It's warmed up in ChCh, but it's still not the hottest, so I suspect those blankets will already be coming in handy.   To be continued....

Blogging about a blog

Just a bit of promotion here. In my day job, I've begun a blog (I've probably already mentioned it here, but at the moment can't be bothered to go back and check). It's focused on resource material (in a very wide sense) for people in ministry (and also for those who are just interested in what's new and what's happening in the Christian scene).

I'd like to get it better known than it is at the moment, so open up those wood shutters, loose those venetian blinds, pull the curtains, open the windows and let everyone know. Of course you can do it! Otherwise I'm going to have to start leaving anonymous comments on it myself to prove that there really is someone reading it.