As the first Doctoral Composer-in-Residence of the Royal Opera House and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Philip Venables has – some might say bravely – chosen to adapt 4.48 Psychosis, the last play by the late British playwright Sarah Kane. Brave for several reasons. Kane's work is renowned for its naked, sometimes brutal, expression and themes, and the nihilism and violence of her plays have caused critical uproar in the past. Moreover, her estate has until now been understandably protective of her legacy; Venables's opera, premiered in May, is the first adaptation they have permitted, and came with instructions to remain as true as possible to the text.
Venables has certainly done that, making only very minor cuts to Kane's 35-page script, and keeping the rest unchanged. Theatrically this is a smart move. Kane's blistering, autobiographically informed account of the descent through depression and psychosis ultimately to suicide is leavened by the wit and fierce humanity of her words. Without them, the play would just be an empty howl.
However, although Kane's script makes for a short play, it is a long libretto. It is also a difficult one: Kane provides no cast list and no directions (apart from the occasional ‘silence’), and none of the lines is assigned to any particular character. It is, therefore, an extremely open work. In previous works such as The Revenge of Miguel Cotto (2012), with the poet Steven J. Fowler, his settings of Simon Howard's poetry (numbers 76–80 and numbers 91–95, both 2011), and his two previous operas, Unleashed, 2012, and The Schmürz, 2013, Venables has shown himself to be a remarkable composer for words. It is therefore little surprise to see him tackle the challenges of 4.48 Psychosis in several imaginative ways, while remaining entirely respectful of the text itself.
As with most productions of the play, Venables has divided the text between multiple voices; in this case, six singers. They aren't equal parts, however: Gweneth-Ann Rand is clearly the lead, and in general the other five represent different facets of the main character (or voices in her head). All six are dressed in the same loose, dull grey clothes, and adopt similar positions around the stage. Kane's text includes four passages of dialogue that may be read as wholly internal, or as taking place with a psychiatrist; in the opera they are presented as external. The doctor (an excellent Lucy Schaufer) even has her own, brief, aria – an isolated moment that provides some relief to the intense single-character focus. Again, this is in Kane's text but required an interpretive decision to bring it out.
More significant is Venables's use of a range of musical styles and idioms to articulate the different modes of address (interior monologue, dialogue, direct address, etc.) that Kane's play seems to contain; when read it is still, unmistakably, a drama. Here Venables proved himself the ideal composer, his score jumping easily from robotic minimalism to waiting room muzak to Purcellian lament, each change giving further shape to the play's drama. Spliced together with hard edits, they gave a strong narrative shape to a script often described as fluid. Nor were his stylistic choices pure caprice: the Dido-esque passacaglia of ‘Find me / free me / from this / corrosive doubt / futile despair’, a strikingly beautiful moment, given to Clare Presland, foreshadows the play's own slide into Elizabethan sermonising later on. Some compositional decisions – projecting lines on the back of the stage, for example – were also made to help get through the amount of text. The best moments were the scenes with the doctor. Here, Kane's pitch-black humour is essential, and timing is everything. Brilliantly, Venables silences all the voices at this point, leaving the projected text to be ventriloquised by two percussionists.
Not everything was a success. Having all six bodies on stage all the time obscured the contour of Kane's alternations between mental chaos and single-voiced clarity; the parts for Jennifer Davis, Susanna Hurrell and Emily Edmonds (apart from one passage of really nasty, over-the-shoulder malevolence) were mostly unmemorable. And something really should have been worked out for everyone on stage to do during the sections when the percussion took up the text. Nevertheless, I cannot recall having been as powerfully moved by an opera as this, much of it watched with my hand clasped over my mouth. Kane's play was the star, but Venables's opera did it justice.
Whereas Venables has composed a sort of musicalised theatre, in which the music is frequently allowed to do just enough to convey the text, Liza Lim's fourth opera, Tree of Codes, premiered at Cologne Opera in April, is more like theatricalised music. It is based upon Jonathan Safran Foer's 2010 novel of the same title. That itself is based on The Street of Crocodiles, a collection of short stories by the pre-war Polish author Bruno Schulz. Having herself written a piece based on The Street of Crocodiles in 1995, it was natural that Lim should turn to Safran Foer's book.
Written for Cologne-based ensemble Musikfabrik, with whom Lim has worked closely in recent years (an earlier outcome being 2011's Tongue of the Invisible), the full title of Lim's new work is Tree of Codes: ‘cut-outs in time’, an opera. In Safran Foer's book die-cutting is used to remove words from the text and open holes through which parts of the pages beneath can be seen. Lim's opera develops this conceit into a world full of holes that enable passage between states and realities, and the creation of hybrid forms in between. Just as Safran Foer's book is as much sculpture as fiction, as much one author's text as another's, so Lim's piece is as much music as theatre.
The stage is populated by beings who are part human and part bird, plant or insect. Dressed in white coats and personal protective equipment, the members of Musikfabrik circulate among tables and workstations on which sit strange objects – a giant bird's head; a mask made up of half a dozen faces; unfamiliar-looking musical instruments. A tramp appears to be conducting. The brilliantly versatile clarinettist Carl Rosman, playing the part of the Mutant Bird, performs as both singer and instrumentalist. The brass players play with double-belled instruments, and the ensemble includes a Stroh viola, a visual-aural hybrid of brass and strings.
Lim's libretto (with dramaturgy by Claire de Ribaupierre) combines elements from both Safran Foer and Schulz with extracts from Goethe and Foucault. It tells of the psychological transformation of a son into his father, as well as of realms between life and death, and between human, animal and vegetable. The Father (a silent part played by Yael Rion) is a scientist, obsessed with birds and creating mutant forms of them. He is already dead but, unbeknownst to him, the laboratory workers have turned time back to give him one last day, during which the Son (Christian Miedl) contends with his obscure, almost mystical legacy. Meanwhile, a storm has vivified a hybrid tree-human (Anne Delahaye), who seduces first the Son and then the Father, and later transmutes into the laboratory worker, Adela (Emily Hindrichs), who created her. When she offers the Father the bird's head mask, he accepts it willingly, but it kills him. At the end, it is the Son himself who must wear it.
Many of the themes – masks, anthropomorphic transformations, instruments as proxies for the voice/prosthetics for the body – have been developed in Lim's work over the last decade or so. However, Tree of Codes not only brings these together in a fantastical piece of storytelling, but also draws out new depths and dimensions. The score contains some of her most lyrical work: Adela's fairytale retelling of the Father's bird-obsession; the Father's funeral procession; the closing a cappella chorus, sung by all 17 instrumentalists. A radiance that is usually just beneath her music's busy surface has been set free. Everything seems to grow out of itself, like buds within flower buds. In comparison to Venables's stark, one-directional arrow, Lim offers an arborescent profusion of images and sensation. Yet despite the sensory overload, one's lasting impression of Tree of Codes is of a coherence that gradually emerges and is, ultimately, sustained over 90 complex, multi-layered minutes.
The brilliance of Lim's music was matched in the costumes, scenography and even lighting, led by Massimo Furlan's design. (Only a series of video projections on the back wall seemed to add little.) Among the particularly notable contributions were Julie Monot's masks, especially her disconcerting many-faced latex construction worn by the Son as he grapples with the psychological legacy of his father. Rion's non-vocal performance as the Father, too: an actor of extraordinary appearance, perfectly cast, he delivered a risk-filled, highly exposing performance with absolute commitment. Musikfabrik, who have become specialists in contemporary music theatre, excelled not only as players, but also singers, actors and even stagehands; Marco Blaauw (trumpet), Axel Porath (Stroh viola), Lorelei Dowling (bassoon) and Dirk Rothbrust (percussion) delivered some of the most striking solo passages.
