The NEWMAN ASSOCIATION


The Twelfth Annual London Newman Lecture will be given by


Professor David Crystal on The Infl uence of the Bible on Modern English


at the St Albans Centre, Baldwin Gardens, High Holborn London EC1


on Thursday 10 March 2011, 6.30 for 7pm.


Tickets priced £5, to include a glass of wine.


Booking and further information on the Newman Association from Percy Ratnanather, 5 Twentyman Close, Woodford Green, London IG8 0EW. percyr@waitrose.com Cheques should be payable to “The Newman Association”. Please enclose SAE.


Registered charity no. 1006769


Dunn Memorial Lecture 2011 HE Cardinal Turkson


President of the Pontifi cal Council for Justice and Peace


‘The Gospel and Social Teaching: On the Economic Crisis, Human Flourishing, and Church Ministry’


10th March, 7.30pm St Cuthbert’s, Old Elvet, Durham


Jointly sponsored between CAFOD Hexham and Newcastle, and the Centre for Catholic Studies.


The lecture is free but a ticket is required to manage numbers. There is also an optional ticketed reception after the event at the


cost of £5. If you wish to attend the lecture please contact Dr Marcus Pound (see


below) indicating whether you wish to also attend the reception, enclosing a cheque accordingly, made payable to: “Durham University – Centre for Catholic Studies”


m.j.p.pound@durham.ac.uk OPERA Morning-after feeling


Die Fledermaus WELSH NATIONAL OPERA, MILLENNIUM CENTRE, CARDIFF AND TOURING


t’s going to be a long night,” says jailer Frosch to his inmates. “You didn’t come here to enjoy yourselves.” Alas, this is in Act 3, and by now the audience knows only too well how right he is. It’s odd to see people staggering out of an


“I


operetta as haggard and ashen-faced as the remnants of Napoleon’s Grande Armée hob- bling home – that’s what you expect from contemporary opera. But Welsh National Opera seems to have an anti-talent for this kind of thing: an infinitely lowering produc- tion of The Merry Widow in Cardiff a few years ago was the only point of comparison I can think of. This production replaces a terrible staging


of Johann Strauss’ operetta – previously sup- posed to be gorgeous, light-fingered and gemütlich – by Calixto Bieito that envisaged the alcohol-fuelled high jinks of these 1870s Wieners as an hysterical orgy in modern Merthyr Tydfil, their inner pain expressed through extreme sadism and brutality. One observed at the time that perhaps Fledermaus was not the precise text for such a sermon, but at least Bieito had a point of view. Since then, WNO has become prema- turely aged, responding to recession with shows apparently aimed at the Saga Holidays market, of which this new production is the nadir. The director responsible is John Copley, a


veteran for whose work I have great respect and whose 37-year-old Covent Garden La Bohème is still going strong. But his approach here is cloyingly cosy. You can take on any work in any number of ways but there is a strained quality to the human contact in Fledermaus, as Bieito noticed, whose char-


28 | THE TABLET | 19 February 2011


acters are able to relate only when anaes- thetised by alcohol. Suggesting that the errant Eisensteins “love each other to death” and are “just a bit bored” rather reduces the interest of their feverish, if unsuccessful, pursuit of adultery. The fact that Strauss clothes some extremely neurotic behaviour in music as light as a cloud should only increase its effect.


But this is a relentlessly square, face-value


and awfully boring interpretation, with Strauss’ marvellously cynical happy ending – “the booze was to blame!” – presented as a Figaro-type benediction. Yes, there are delib- erate echoes: we know really that neither is a happy-ever-after moment, but where Mozart aims for transcendent truth, Strauss gleefully undermines. There’s much to slog through before then, and hints early on that Copley might be about to explore the power for good and ill of music and alcohol vanish, as bubbles in stale cham- pagne. Rather, we get seamless caricature, from Paul Charles Clarke’s unstoppable – and rather well sung – Italian tenor Alfred, forever yodelling “Go compare” and “Just one Cornetto”, to Nuccia Focile’s grande dame Rosalinde, with an accent out of the same ice- cream carton and a characterisation to match. Mark Stone, as her husband, struggles gamely to burst out of his trammels, as does Joanne Boag’s archly sparky maid, Adele, but there is nowhere for them to go. Despite beautifully idiomatic playing – full of sparkle, lovely violin slurs and prickly wood- wind comments – by the orchestra under the Viennese conductor Thomas Rösner, the leaden staging of Act 2, a brilliant fantasy that charts the exact progress of alcoholic decline, prevents anything taking shape. Things, as often, reach their lowest point with the arrival of the comic jailer. Much money has been spent on costumes,


rather less on sets, though Howard Harrison’s lighting is cheesily effective. Plenty of the audience, presumably weaned on pantos star- ring Max Boyce, loved it; as Prince Orlofsky comments, chacun à son gout. Robert Thicknesse


Helen Lepalaan (Orlofsky) Nuccia Focile (Rosalinde) and David Stout (Falke)


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