EIF: Phaedra / Minotaur
Royal Lyceum Theatre - 18/08/23
Deborah Warner, director | Kim Brandstrup, choreographer | Christine Rice, mezzo soprano | Richard Hetherington, musical director and piano | Tommy Franzen, Jonathan Goddard, Isabel Lubach, dancers
Produced by Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath by arrangement with the Royal Opera House
‘Phaedra,’ Benjamin Britten’s final work for voice, sung and played with clarity and conviction by Christine Rice and Richard Hetherington is paired with a retelling of the family’s further travails in Minotaur, an athletic and emotionally-charged ballet for three dancers.
Britten completed ‘Phaedra’, based on Robert Lowell’s verse translation of Racine, for mezzo soprano, Janet Baker and small orchestra in 1975, the year of his death. His biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, suggests that the heroine’s guilty lust for her stepson presented Britten with “the terrible self-reproaches of another Aschenbach”, the hero of his last opera, ‘’Death in Venice’, while the heart-beat rhythm of the drums and Phaedra’s musings on death were potent reminders of his own mortality. Composer Colin Matthews (who, as a young teacher in 1975 helped the frail Britten by playing the work on piano as he composed it) has with the permission of the Britten Pears Foundation, written a solo piano transcription of the score for Richard Hetherington, who also plays his own short introduction to Deborah Warner’s staging.
On a bare white stage lie a dark figure, and a white crumpled sheet. Mezzo soprano, Christine Rice as Phaedra, grey-haired in a loose shift, approaches as the dark figure of the Minotaur stands and leaves the stage. Rice’s singing and acting of the music and text are of a piece and entirely compelling. She clutches her body in her lust for her stepson, and shakes with passion, as she sings Lowell’s blunt lines “Look this monster, ravenous for her execution will not flinch/I want your sword’s spasmodic final inch.” Her “thick adulterous passion for this youth” is heightened when she pulls away the sheet from the sleeping Hippolytus, who walks away in disdain. Frantically she sniffs his scent on the sheet, wrapping it round herself like a shroud. Britten wrote for the highest part of Baker’s voice, and Rice, too, rises to these heights as she poisons herself. “Death will give me freedom: oh it’s nothing not to live.” In a Festival which seemed low on opera, here is a distilled cantata of searing beauty. Rice has form in this mythology - I saw her as Ariadne to John Tomlinson’s Minotaur in Harrison Birtwistle’s devastating gore-spattered opera 10 years ago. Like him, she possesses the rare ability to completely inhabit a role. Our eyes are mesmerised by Rice, but her performance has the perfect foil in Hetherington’s piano realisation of the reworked score.
Blood stains the black back wall for a very different Minotaur, Danish choreographer, Kim Brandstrup’s version for three dancers, Jonathan Goddard, Theseus, Isabel Lubach, Ariadne, and Tommy Franzen, who, vanquished as the Minotaur returns as Dionysius, climbing and swinging down the black rock-face as a dramatic deus ex machina. The dancers’ ever-shifting sensuous movements in their paired dances, limbs appearing to meld together, are accompanied by the intriguing score/soundtrack and percussion of Eilon Morris, featuring ancient horns, drums, pounding rustic dances, vocalised harmonies, and a piano solo.
The first of three performances of these two intense works are received enthusiastically by the Royal Lyceum audience.
Cover photo: Tristram Kenton
