Mirabel's wonderland, 1927's dystopia

It's been a staggering year for opera in the UK: quite how staggering I didn't realise until I tried to compile a shortlist 'Best of 2014' for The Arts Desk, and even then there wasn't time to slip in a mention for one of the best children's operas I've seen, partly because this was its second year of performances - Will Todd's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland around the lawns and glades of Holland Park.

It isn't my intention to go over that magical ground again - I've already done so in review and on the blog - but it crops up again because Mirabel, my youngest goddaughter by 16 years, deep joy to go back into childhood again with words and music, is still caught up in the wonderland magic. She's pictured up top with the enchanting Alice of Fflur Wyn after the show - 1927's production of The Golem, seen above in the first of Bernhard Müller's production photos, will have to wait to move into the limelight - and below treading the Mad Hatter's teapot carpet.

I went up to Islington to deliver gifts for her fourth birthday just over a week before Christmas: Lewis Carroll's own under-10s version The Nursery Alice, the only time John Tenniel ever hand-coloured his own illustrations (specimens below) and with a very different if sometimes, for us, slightly cloying, wit and wisdom for the tots, plus the DVD of the Royal Ballet Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and my own CD compilation of music to go with the book. Note to self of what's on it as I didn't keep a copy, and I can cut and paste this in an email to Mirabel and ma Edwina:

The White Rabbit - 'The Interrupted Departure', No. 17 of Prokofiev's Cinderella

Wonderland and Alice's growing/shrinking - 'The Aquarium' and 'Personages with Long Ears' from Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals

Swimming in the Pool of Tears - 'Panorama' from Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty

The Caucus Race - Galop from Khachaturian's Masquerade Suite

The Caterpillar - 'Arabian Dance' from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker

Alice arrives at the Duchess's house, the crying baby and lost in the woods - Sequence from the 'child at play' movement of Strauss's Symphonia Domestica

The Mad Hatter - Polka from Shostakovich's The Age of Gold

Court of the Queen of Hearts and Lobster Quadrille - March and Gavotte from Britten's The Prince of the Pagodas

Trial - second half of Debussy's 'Fêtes' from Nocturnes

Back on the river bank - closing sequence of Debussy's Prelude à l'après-midi d'un faune

It later occurred to me that I could also slip in the end of 'The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin' from John Lanchbery's marvellous score to the Royal Ballet's The Tales of Beatrix Potter' for Bill the Lizard shooting through the chimney and ' Puss in Boots and the White Cat' from Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty for the Cheshire Cat.

But enough already. The results of this chez Mirabel I have yet to see, but while I was there the young miss bossed ma and me around in scenes from the book in which we both had to play various parts (ma did well when assigned the Duchess) but M was always Alice. I was dead impressed that she cited 'Caucus Race' as one of our scenes, but then I would be, wouldn't I? And apparently 'baroque' is a palace in the sky, stemming from an Aurora Orchestra performance she attended in which that image stood for the style of music.

Before I finish the adoration of young Dancing Delice, as I call Mirabel - as she may or may not embark on the Suzuki method, she may also become Fiddling Felice - I have to put up three shots by mama of her spontaneous and (Edsy swears, and she wouldn't lie) unassisted Lego response a week after she'd been to Holland Park. The Caterpillar:

The Mad Hatter:

and Mr Pantz as the White Rabbit.

I should explain that Mr Pantz is a bad-tempered toy elephant, excluded from Mirabel's christening service but caught eating cake and quaffing champagne at the reception, who is central to artist Edsy's film mythology. Watch him animated (or rather not) in pursuit of mammal studies besides Lake Leman here. And behold him below pictured with some batty friend (apparently).

It's not too tenuous to link the weird and wonderful E Ashton world to the genius I saw on the Young Vic stage the other Saturday. The young and brilliant company 1927 - still not got to the origin of the date-name, but I assume it's to do with a heyday of silent film expressionism - gave us their own 90-minute take on the Jewish myth of the Golem (pronounced Goe-lem, hence not to be confused with Tolkien's little monster), that clay mannekin which takes on a life ot its own. My colleague Alexandra Coghlan's five star review on The Arts Desk was all the encouragement I needed to go back to my favourite London theatre. If you think video production has been overdone in theatre, think again. This is one long animated film, brilliantly realised by Paul Barritt, in which the cast of five play live parts.

Not only that, but two or more of them keep the piano and percussion score by Lillian Henley going. It's based almost entirely on tritones and obsessively monothematic, never monotonous, and for the second time at the Young Vic since Richard Jones's sensational Annie Get Your Gun, with its anti-choreography, we get show numbers which are the antithesis of showy. Except, that is, for the songs of the punk band run by the sister of the protagonist, who narrates this fable of technological 'improvement'.

Should I give the story away? I think I'll let you see how they tell it for yourselves; suffice it to say that Golem One sets in the rot, Golem Two is a control-freak who helps the 'hero' to what he wants, including two girlfriends

and Golem Three is IN US. I have only one slight cavil, that the material is a touch overstretched, but there's so much to take in at every point that it's never exactly boring. It ought to run off with every award for theatrical ingenuity; certainly it's one of my shows of the year.

When senior goddaughter Rosie May asked me what she should take her 15 year old brother Paddy to see, I suggested this. As it turned out we didn't go to the same performance that Saturday - we got in to the matinee, she and Paddy attended the evening show - but we still met up for a burger lunch at the excellent Young Vic cafe. As not all adults in the below photo wish to have names attached to the jolly pic, suffice it to say that Paddy and Rosie are on the right.

After lunch, the two young 'uns went off to the Imperial War Museum, we were ready for the show and after we came out were rewarded by a sunset on The Cut

which simply got richer as we stood outside chatting.

Half the country may be groaning under heavy snow, but here in London it's been more often than not bright and crisp. And now I must go out for a bike ride while the sun is still shining before the next bout of entertaining.

The only way is Essex - 1

Whatever that means exactly - thank you, reality TV - there are at least three ways to approach England's most maligned county, pictured above: step inside one of the many old buildings (in this case the Norman remainder of Waltham Abbey); ramble in deepest farmland only a 25 minute journey from the City of London (a distant diplo-mate approaching Mountnessing Church); or brave the urban blight to reach your destination (the end of a horrid walk from Waltham Cross railway station to the Abbey). At least another option - the marshes and the sea - was ruled out by the biting winds and freeze of the Thursday and Friday we took off.

The original aim had been to fly south for a long weekend, but half-term fares proved prohibitively expensive (seems we've sorted one objective now for the near future). So I thought we should capitalise on our delighted discovery of Layer Marney, Tollesbury, East Mersey and Copford while staying with the Le Franc family back in 2007 and the subsequent revelation of lovely Saffron Walden in the company of the Kafalas a year later by getting to know a neighbouring county better. Armed with the excellent Pathfinder Guide, we planned out some options.

With the grey and the bitter cold of Thursday forbidding our intended hike around the coastal Saxon church of Bradwell Juxta Mare, we caught a train from Liverpool Street to Ingatestone, and were immediately charmed by what Pevsner calls the 'friendly Neo-Tudor' of the 1846 station building. The glory is the medieval church tower of St Edmund and St Mary

with its black diapers of lozenges and crosses (there too is the top of the 'three-light brick w window with Perp panel tracery' - Pevsner again - and the first set of two-light windows).

Predictably the church was locked. We phoned the warden (correction, 9/3: rector), who claimed to live not very close and seemed unwilling to drive to Ingatestone and let us in. As J pointed out, I should have said something along the lines of 'we've come a long way to see this', but I wasn't at the time aware of the Petre tomb chest, treasure of the interior; if I had been, I'd have made a bit more of a fuss.

Ingatestone High Street is a mix of old and new, chiefly remarkable to me for the fact that I purchased a by then essential blue woolly (looking) hat for £2.99 in a hardware store over a friendly chat with the people in the shop. There's a very flinty mosaicy type mural on one of the less attractive more recent buildings which looks as if it dates from Festival of Britain time.

Then we were off over the fields, past Sir William Petre's 16th century red-brick Ingatestone Hall. The monastery-dissolver and recusant Catholic had the mural's Queen Elizabeth to stay here, which still makes the town and the odd visiting tourist excited.

Crossing the stream of the Wid, you climb gently to the deliciously secluded church of St Mary Buttsbury.

The body of the church (locked again, naturally, in spite of what the welcoming board at the gate may say) is 14th century, but its attraction is the timber, weatherboarded west belfry. The porch is attractively weatherboarded too.

Ironwork on the north door caught my eye before I found out that much of it was 13th century.

There was now a longish stretch by stream and through fields, past a burnt out car below Kitchen Wood

and up to the church of St Giles at Mountnessing, isolated next to a Georgian hall and farm (though a road runs close). Here's another fine bell tower and west end

though there's apparently less to see inside than at Ingatestone. Which was just as well, since our third church was also locked and the contact numbers in the porch had faded away. Anyway, here we sat out of the biting wind to devour the sushi lunch purchased at Liverpool Street Station. The diplo-mate wanted a photo of the occasion but was as usual coy about revealing his entire lovely visage.

The rest of the walk is lost to visual documentation because my battery had run flat and something went wrong with the transferring of pictures from J's mobile phone. Here's a similarly cloudy-day image taken by another of Mountnessing proper's early 19th century post-mill a couple of miles further on. Gareth Hughes' Geograph project photo includes 'visiting Dutch and Belgian windmill enthusiasts'. Interesting if not especially penetrating observation on the unconscious that here I started to hum the Van der Valk theme (you don't need to be old enough to have seen that series to guess that the hero was an Amsterdam detective).

The dark began to descend, as did we back to Ingatestone. Had this been a collect-churches-for-charity walk like our annual Norfolk expedition, we could have notched up nine in our eight miles, since the town boasts a fair few 19th and early 20th century edifices of various denominations. So back to London, where serendipity found us two returns on the spot for Rufus Norris's ambitious celebration of Yoruba culture, Feast, at the Young Vic. Splendid company work here, dominated by the handsome, well modulated mezzo tones of Noma Dumezweni (J's New Best Friend), the character panache of Naana Agyei-Ampadu and incredibly sexy dancing - not enough of it, sadly - by Cuban Alexander Varona (image by Richard Hubert Smith).

The problem lay with most of the various playwrights' contributions: few made clear the advertised connection between scenes from the Yoruba diaspora and the various reincarnations of the 400 or so deities known as Orishas, so it came across as a rather loose, hit-and-miss revue.

Still, it was a steamy far cry indeed from the wintry wildernesses of Essex. That's enough of a chronicle for now: glorious Waltham Abbey to follow soon.

Elegy for botched prospects

Not exactly what I wanted to see last night as I pedalled over Westminster Bridge on the way back from seeing Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers at the Young Vic. Still, as my godson said many years ago as we flew into Heathrow from Venice in 70mph winds, and passengers were vomiting into whatever they could lay their hands on, 'aren't the lights of London pretty?' And they were last night, if many may well be soon extinguished. Here, for instance, is the rainbow coalition of the Eye and the former County Hall on the other side of the bridge.


And it could be worse. If only there's still enough money to pay for a show of such staggering brilliance as Fiona Shaw's production of the Henze last night (all production shots are by Sarah Lee for ENO).


What visual beauty, what ensemble work and, ultimately, what a piece. I hedged my bets after the first act a bit as Henze's customary beauty of scoring - here for a very selective ensemble including mandolin, guitar and musical saw - delivered great sounds but not many ideas that could fix themselves in the mind. But by the devastating final act, there were quite a few that had. It's probably the first time I've been totally hooked by a Henze opera on stage: I do hope to see Der Junge Lord, of which there's a gripping film now on DVD, but Boulevard Solitude gave me a thick head, I can't remember the first thing about The Prince of Homburg and the world premiere of Das Verratene Meer, chiefly remarkable in that it got me to Berlin for the first time in the good old days of The Sunday Correspondent, only upped the tension in the last act. Anyway, this was one to set a good example to Ades and Turnage, both in last night's audience.

And it's surely one of the great opera librettos, by which of course I mean the wonderful structure as well as the text. By 1959 Auden and Kallman had of necessity set aside the rococo poetry of The Rake's Progress in favour of something pithier. If it were just, yawn, a bare symbolic treatment of the creative artist's selfishness, it wouldn't hold us spellbound for as long as it does. But Auden and Kallman make it especially fascinating by the rise and fall of fortunes. In Act 1, psychopathic poet Gregor Mittenhofer is dependent on the visions of widow Hilda Mack, walled up with him in an Austrian mountain inn, who's been waiting over the past 40 years for her husband to return from an expedition on the treacherous Hammerhorn. When his body finally emerges from the glacier, Hilda is transformed from a 20th century Lucia into a pragmatic lady, from fury to Eumenide. Mittenhofer's vampiric instincts transfer themselves to his young mistress Elisabeth's love affair with the son of his physician. It's no spoiler to say that he sends the lovers to their death both out of personal revenge and to fuel his 'Elegy for Young Lovers'.

Bit earnest? Not at all in this vivacious, purposeful production. Shaw gets superb performances from all six singers of her Cosi-like ensemble. I was utterly spellbound by the wonderful Lucy Schaufer as Mittenhofer's harrassed patroness and private secretary, Countess Carolina, who moves from realistic and often very funny stressy hyperactivity to haunted disgust. Here she is at one crux with the young lovers as sung by Kate Valentine and Robert Murray.


Essentially Schaufer's Lina changes places over the action with the initially pathetic, later hilariously forceful Hilda, a dazzling sing from Jennifer Rhys-Davies who can do the coloratura as well as the lyric-dramatic stuff. I wonder if Shaw intended parallels with screen immortal Marianne Sagebrecht, star of Adlon's Bagdad Cafe? Anyway, here's Rhys-Davies pictured centre with Stephen Kennedy in the speaking role of Alpine guide Josef Mauer.


The others come into focus more slowly - in Act Two, it's the turn of the exquisite Kate Valentine as mistress Elisabeth, given a haunting monologue as she's left wondering whether Mittenhofer will bless her departure with her new lover. In Act Three the lover, Robert Murray, also has his moment in a death scene of startling beauty. Auden and Kallman's genius is to have the young lovers imagine that they're an old couple who've been together for 40 years: what children, what affairs, might they have had?


At this point the backdrop of the ever-changing screen at the back of the stage reaches new visionary heights, most of them the creation of video artist Lynette Walworth. Shaw made her operatic debut with the similar visual originality of the Sibelius/Vaughan Williams double-bill at the Coli, and this equals that achievement.

I've also never seen Steven Page better: his rages at close quarters are truly terrifying, driven by razor-sharp playing from the brass under the superb Stefan Blunier.


The ending could be corny, but it's not: Henze, Shaw and the singers strike not one emotional false note. Our Fiona is making a bid to be up there for sheer focused energy with Richard Jones, whom she told Ed Seckerson she hugely admires for his 'metatexting'. This cries out to be filmed and recorded; but sadly it's not even to be heard on Radio 3. Do something quick, please, ENO.