Vivienne/Fossils and Monsters, Riverside Studios - opera review
Vivienne
★★★★★
Fossils and Monsters
★★★☆☆
Three new pieces of work for solo female performers graced Riverside’s Tête à Tête Festival last night. All were interesting. One was very good indeed — Stephen McNeff’s Vivienne, a 40-minute piece which gives yet more limelight to TS Eliot’s ill-fated first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Alone in her asylum cell, Viv, played by Clare McCaldin, remembers her marriage and all that has brought her there.
McNeff delivers an unpredictable yet instantly appealing score. The story unwraps in songs that always hint at popular idiom — crunchy bebop infuses her late-Forties mourning, Berlin-style cabaret hints at Eliot’s possible Fascist sympathies — but their structure is elastic and mutable. You enjoy the tune but never quite catch it.
Andy Rashleigh’s libretto is allusive and witty: an affair with Bertrand Russell unfolds with reference to Macavity the Mystery Cat. All is delivered by catty, horny McCaldin, all with a sheen of barmy. It’s a far better performance than we’re entitled to from someone who can also sing.
Meanwhile, compilation piece Fossils and Monsters showcases two other historical ladies, both played by mezzo Alison Wells. Judith Bingham’s Mary Anning takes us on a walk with the titular 19th-century palaeontologist. Wells sings unaccompanied save for her own feet on a gravel shore, and some stones she clicks together: a simple way into the ordered mind of a fossil collector.
Science Fictions, which forms a part of Fossils and Monsters, concerns Mary Shelley, and while I initially loved Colin Riley’s music, awash with trip-hop and Herbie Hancock crazy-funk, I found John Ginman’s libretto declamatory and unfocused. The music followed it into a frenzy that I didn’t enjoy.
