The Tête à Tête Opera Festival 2014

It’s lonely up Saxon Court. Eleventh floor. Social housing on the lower section but I’m told they can’t ride the lift higher than four. The equivalent of a ‘poor door’. Building works or the far tinkle of an alarm, a nearly constant companion. Night freight and Eurostar. A large communal terrace on eight which nobody ever seems to use. A succession of fire doors whump shut behind you in the airless corridors. Some social housing tenants look ‘those in most need’. A pained alchie on the benches, someone lost-looking asking for a pound, rather than real social mix. I don’t want token extremes, cheek by jowl, avoiding one another. Perhaps the designer loneliness of Saxon Court is inequality.

I sit to write short stories but they don’t want to be written. One was called ‘Sad Adults’, about a happy-go-lucky child, contrasting against the mummified depression of the adults around him. Instead I go to another redundancy party (there’s money in getting rid of people, zero houring, minimum waging). I run the canal and drink tea in another divine sunset, far beyond this endless construction site.

It occurs to me that there is a threshold where inequality gets so extreme that comparisons can no longer meaningfully happen, and the Haves become divine, as good as, on a rolling cloud of investment income. I cannot help contrasting Saxon Court to the lively, earthly ecstasy of the housing estate where I grew up. There are no smiles in the housing hubs and culture zones unless smiles are a part of the marketing package.

The opening weekend of a season of modern opera is taking place two minutes from the apartments. The world’s largest collection of ‘surprising, daring and intimate’ opera. I am passing trade. Isn’t opera an archaic form for Mitteleuropean bourgeoisie (and anyone seeking to thus appropriate)? What is edgy new opera? What does it look like?

‘Spirit Harbour’ by Opera Kitsune

1. Mobile phones. They get referenced a lot, because they are modern. Txt speak goes mezzo-soprano. Libretto as LOLocaust.

2. Audience plants. A pining soubrette will trill “My phone is dy-ing, only three per-cent left” which prompts a bull-like tenor parked next to you to bellow “I have a charg-er. I will charge it for you.” Several other plants sing to one another, then progress down onto the stage. You begin to wonder if you are the only real audience member present.

3. Pop-up and off-stage settings. From “My world is end-ing” boomed in the khasi to actual street corners for a tender internet dating rendezvous. (“I’ll talk a-bout the wea-ther.” “Don’t talk a-bout the wea-ther.”) The language of opera gets clearer for you. Self-talk is projected to unreal heights, suspended in the air like a flag. Inner recitative is elevated outwards. “The loudest sound in the universe happens inside us,” said someone, and they could be explaining the aria.

4. Bad language. “It is fu-cking every-where. Be-cause it is mod-ern.”

5. Hard-hitting subject matter. Misery as digestion. In Pete M Wyer’s ‘Gut’ a low, lone baritone spirals through a bout of reactive depression. The episode is traced like an arc. From trigger, chew and chew, willful isolation, self-hate, self-pity, murder fantasies, through to a kind of ‘exhale’ plateau where he can eat himself up no longer. And.. rest. Perspective changes nil. Phew, for a minute there I lost myself. All under a gloomy Bergmanesque shoreline on backing video.

6. Surrealism. “She is bur-ied in battenberg. Glacé fruits drool in a tur-ban tomb.”

7. Feminism. An extraterrestrial would assume from Errollyn Wallen and the Welsh National Opera’s ‘Anon’ that women exist to get worshipped, resented, slipped Rohypnol, raped, trafficked, forced to sell themselves, genitally mutilated and strangled with their own burka (doubling neatly as a bodybag) for disgracing their family. Wallen wants the reality of women’s ‘untold stories’ not so much smuggled into as ram-raided through opera’s high brow (though a dying woman in the finale is oddly traditional). In some ways ‘Anon’ is dramatic to the point where there is no drama. It is a parade of nasty stuff, beautifully sung. Religion and sex seem a bit absolved. “Be my mor-ning, my eve-ning, my ev-er-ything be-tween,” the lament of being female on Earth peters away.

8. Sexism. A sexist mad scientist makes a walking, talking girl-toy and then removes her throat. Now you’re talkin’.

9. Transgressing the form. Some wondered out loud if they had seen an opera at all after Josh Spear and Ben Kelly’s ‘That Woman’, a claustrophobic dream sequence set in Wallis Simpson’s final years, devastated but still hated in Paris hotel rooms, following the death of David, the abdicated Edward VIII. A landscape of props pass before handheld macro lenses for an intimate ‘live film’ projecting her brain to ceiling, as they carry a doting Wallis back to bed, and out again, over and over, revisiting the war, the love story, the Riviera, the paranoia. Occasional suspended notes were sung, like dying embers of an aria lit by the wind. The passing trade seemed a bit “bloody hell”.

10. Philosophy. A sad woman sits making origami birds and trying to breathe life into them. Each one flaps to the floor. The heart-broken hide inside stones. There’s a prince and a fox who was once a woman, killed by his arrow. If loveless, childless men have a place where they seem to excel, in philosophy, then weighty women still have opera sown up. ‘Spirit Harbour’ by Opera Kitsune, a delicate, robotic blend of Noh and modern opera, had a secondary character who wiped out her colleagues. Physical presence to back up the projection, so right you begin to decide that opera is the sound of oestrogen. In this piece the voices tale-tell, inner and outer worlds combine, people sing-talk over the top of one another, like a Robert Altman film. So formal, so destined, so Japanese, ‘Spirit Harbour’ paints living as a prison, for a free listener. There is beauty in being an animated meat structure with the brief privilege it entails, barely able to look further than the paths laid by our chemistry, and knowing it.

The 8th Annual Tête-à-Tête Festival continues until 10th August, Platform Theatre and King’s Place, London