There is no doubt that Bill Bankes-Jones and Opera Tête à Tête have produced some of the most innovative work and platforms for new composers, librettists and performers in recent years. Exactly what the balance of input was between Tête à Tête and the show’s producer, the Royal College of Music, was not clear from the programme, but the RCM Opera Orchestra under Tim Murray did the composers proud; the stagings were directed by Bankes-Jones, and were designed by Sarah Booth. The company – too numerous to mention here – worked as an ensemble, with the soloists working in mute chorus in the other pieces. The evening, which promised much, delivered.
Five images of Hogarth’s were harnessed by five librettists, who created five new librettos which were then set by Royal College of Music composers. Each opera was fifteen minutes long, and responded ‘to Hogarth’s witty and bitingly acute social commentaries by offering its own unique take on modern society.’ The scores, all skillful, ranged from some spikey support for the vocal lines to the rhapsodic Now. The peg on which this event was hung was the 250th anniversary of Hogarth’s death, but in fact, the power of Hogarth’s images is such that a peg of this sort was not really needed to make this both a viable and fascinating event.
In order of performance, the works were On False Perspective , with a libretto by Benjamin Osborne and a score by Josephine Stephenson, which used Hogarth’s ‘A satire on false perspective’ of 1754; The Bet , with libretto and a score by Algirdas Kraunaitis, which used ‘The Marriage Settlement’ from the Marriage à-la-mode series of 1743-45; Now, with a libretto by Laura Attridge and a score by Lewis Murphy, which used the painting of ‘Southwark Fair’ of 1733; Hogarth’s Bastards, with a libretto by Hunter Coblentz & Jordan O’Connor and a score by Hunter Coblentz, which used prints of ‘The four stages of cruelty’ of 1751; and Serpentine or The Analysis of Beauty, with a libretto by Ned Allenand a score by Edwin Hillier, which used the plate of the ballroom from The Analysis of Beauty of 1753.
The connections with Hogarth’s original pictures emphasized just how powerful these images are, even at this distance. On False Perspective was set in the city of false perspective, in which the barista makes water flow backwards, and a young woman has memories of the future. The Bet follows Marriage à-la-mode in exposing human weaknesses. Now uses the shambles of Southwark Fair, in which the crowds of the lower classes are juxtaposed with a distant view of a better life beyond the fair, with a fantasy world presented to them through strolling players. The opera takes place in ‘an Orwellian-style dystopian metropolis’, against which the citizens rebel in a united search for a future. Hogarth’s Bastards asks: are we, the audience, ‘complicit in the acts of intolerance and cruelty’ that take place, as the dysfunctional cast of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (‘a dead Viennese composer’) turn on one another when grappling with the production’s appalling reviews (which arrive by tablet in the dressing room)? Serpentine or The Analysis of Beauty uses Hogarth’s theory of beauty to construct a modern dance hall (‘The Serpentine Club’) in which to play out ‘Love is pressure. Love is kind. Love is Serpentine.’ In the performance, the relevant image appeared on a screen over the stage, so that the surtitles appeared under the appropriate Hogarth picture.
The main production conceit was a carved picture frame placed centrally on the stage, with two similar side frames sloping away in both real and implied perspective. These created an open three-sided box reminiscent of a bay window. The frame stayed in place for the whole five operas, where it worked with varying effectiveness; not surprisingly, it worked best in On False Perspective, the work where the discussion of perspective was part of the narrative. In The Bet, it was reversed, with the audience seeming to look into the street beyond (where one entertaining production detail had placed a Blue Plaque to William Hogarth on the wall opposite). In Serpentine or The Analysis of Beauty, it provided an in-out perspective, where those in the frame (and in a night club) had adopted the posture of the accepted ‘S’ curve, and which allowed the lone dancer Ida, who had not measured up, to be pushed outside the frame.
On False Perspective introduced us to the central design idea of the costumes: the use of the eighteenth-century costumes in the midst of modern ones, which allowed the different planes of the historical and the modern to mix freely throughout the evening. It was particularly effective in Hogarth’s Bastards, where the characters were in eighteenth-century costumes as they prepare for the performance of Don Giovanni. And in On False Perspective, the whole modern dress opera was mediated by the Professor in eighteenth-century clothes who sat at a desk on one side of the stage, present as the audience arrived; this is a production strategy that mostly doesn’t work, but in this case, when the curtain went up, it empowered his position outside the already-mentioned frame.
On the whole, the comedic operas worked better than the ones that tried a more profound response to Hogarth. From the first half came The Bet, a Hogarthian parable of greed, which started with a high-minded discussion between two characters (un-named in the libretto) on whether people are intrinsically good or bad. The two characters set up a bet, in which one proposed to show that all people are intrinsically bad. The proposer’s strategy is simple; he offers to give money to anyone who can make a good case to be given it, and then watches while human greed fights the matter out. The petitioners – a harlot with a large bust (a totally eighteenth-century sleaze character if ever there was one), a shyster with a pile of probably fraudulent prospectuses, and an old woman on a zimmer frame – each claim the money for a ‘good cause’. The harlot offers love, pushing the head of the bet’s proposer into her cleavage; the shyster wants the money to start a business; and the old woman wants to give it to ‘charity’, a cause which is obviously herself. The proposer of the bet clearly wins, and the scene ends with the shyster needing a drink, but being offered tea by the zimmer frame lady, a comment both on the darkness of Hogarth’s caricaturing of alcohol abuse, and on the rise of formal charity work in the eighteenth century.
The triumph of the evening, however, was Hogarth’s Bastards, a skillful meta-opera if ever there was one. Some of the strength of the libretto lay in the use of the Don Giovanni story; the characters from Mozart’s 1787 opera gave the audience a back story, and extra context for each of the performers’ anxieties: Donna Anna’s flask of whiskey which accompanies her on stage, the Commendatore’s failing memory, as he totters into senility not remembering his lines; and best of all (and parodying too many singers), Donna Elvira’s complete lack of interest in the production at hand, merely spending time talking of her next self-promoting gig of opera bon-bons (to be performed in a red dress), which will raise money to enable brown children to ride bicycles.
A libretto of this skill and insight – including the lines involving singers’ ‘fucking websites’ and ‘fucking headshots’ – can only have been written by someone in the business, and the whole show demonstrated yet again why there was such a fashion during the eighteenth century for plays about the theatre, and operas about the opera house; as on this occasion, the singers clearly enjoyed parodying the profession, and the audience was in the know.
Memo: it is now not cool for those on stage to pose for a photograph (as in The Bet) with a camera in the middle of the opera; to be au courant, a selfie on a mobile is required here!
Hogarth’s Stages was at the Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music, London, on Friday 16 & Saturday 17 May. Produced by the Royal College of Music in association with Tête à Tête.