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The synopsis for Miss Fortune states that ‘the opera explores what it means to be rich or poor, the mysteries of everyday life, and the effects of chance, luck and accidents on human existence’. That is simply not true. The opera is too brief, at one and a half hours, to explore anything much, at most it can be said to present some of these subjects in a highly schematic way. To get us involved to any degree with these issues, Weir needed to create characters, and all we have here are ciphers with names. And possibly the gravest mistake is to personalise Fate, when the only way to prevent the term Fate from vacuity is to leave it as omnipresent and nebulous. Fate is the name people invoke when their lives take a surprising turn for the better or the worse, and that is all there is to it. To have a character singing the role of Fate is to suggest that he/it is responsible for some things and not others.
Weir makes her text all the more dubious by having as the crux of the action a lottery which Tina — Miss Fortune — would win if only one of her numbers were different. Fate takes a hand, time moves briefly backwards, and she has all the numbers right. Then she throws her ticket away. The synopsis ends: ‘Everyone celebrates, watched thoughtfully by Fate.’ He must have wondered why he bothered.
The music is agreeably eclectic, quite unmemorable, and mostly very well performed, and the set is colourful and largely abstract. I found it appealing, but my taste in sets is unreliable. There are also some solid everyday objects, including the equipment of a launderette and a kebab van. Most striking among the performers is a group of breakdancers, though I didn’t see that they added anything except fun and some plausible violence. Emma Bell is Tina, and Jacques Imbrailo is the rich Simon, both make as much of their roles as possible, which turns out to be not much. An admirable cast includes the young tenor Noah Stewart, as Hassan, owner of the looted kebab van. Paul Daniel conducts, Chen Shi-Zheng is the director.
The Royal Academy of Music’s termly offering was Die Zauberflöte, of which I saw the second cast. Musically it was on a distinguished level, major credit being due to the superbly sprung but relaxed conducting of Jane Glover. She kept things moving, but gave the most solemn, awe-inspiring stretches plenty of room. The Priests’ Chorus ‘O Isis und Osiris’ was a transcendent moment. The cast had no weak link, though Thomas Elwin’s Tamino didn’t need to shout. The work was performed in German — one sees why, but the variety of accents, the Queen of the Night’s being especially bizarre, made an odd effect. If only the production, by Stephen Barlow, had been less inane. Set in 1970s California, it opens with Tamino having a bad trip in a club, moves in due course to the Life Improvement Academy, presided over by Sarastro, the kind of youthful proselytiser one dreads finding on the doorstep, and takes in the headquarters of a porn magazine edited by the Queen of the Night. All this makes taking any of the opera seriously almost impossible, though the audience was only too pleased to bellow with laughter whenever possible. Please, RAM, have the courage to be unfashionable.
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