At Music Theatre Wales |
| Music Theatre Wales- The Lighthouse , Everyman, Cheltenham , July 3, 2001 |
| Peter Maxwell Davies's The Lighthouse has so many points of contact with Benjamin Britten that it could be read as an open tribute. Like Peter Grimes, it begins with a court of enquiry, and is saturated with the sounds of the sea. Like Billy Budd, it deals with a claustrophobically enclosed all-male cast. Like Turn of the Screw, it could be a ghost story, or a study in hysteria and self-delusion. But the music is utterly distinctive, gripping the listener on its own terms. And the message is very un-Britten-like. This is no tale of beautiful male innocence meeting corrupt adult experience. The three lighthouse-keepers and the three ship's officers who claim to have found the lighthouse eerily deserted - both groups played by the same three singers - are all very adult. It may have been the keepers' guilt that drove them to their destruction; the ship's officers may be lying about what they found when they arrived, to save their own necks. Even Davies's detractors would surely have to admit that his music tackles frustration, violence and mounting terror very well, and that The Lighthouse contains some of his finest sullen, brooding seascapes. All of that came over well in this performance by Music Theatre Wales, conducted by Michael Rafferty. The keepers' three big parody songs are clever, funny, even touching. They are also a neat way to smuggle in arias by the back door. Michael Bennett (Sandy) and Gwion Thomas (Blazes) performed their set pieces particularly well: Bennett's well controlled singing made his sentimental love song achingly sad; Thomas's tale of murder, theft and fatal deception was corrosively funny and horrific at the same time. Kelvin Thomas, as the religious fanatic Arthur, was more flawed vocally: notes could be fuzzy, he wasn't always with the beat and his diction was less than ideally clear. But his weird, apocalyptic sermonising raised the temperature well enough as the climax drew near. |
Reviewed by: Stephen Johnson, The Guardian |
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