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The
Times / Richard Morrison (May 2010)
The Lion's Face at the Theatre Royal,
Brighton
Clearly
an opera about dementia isn't going to be a romp. But I was far more charmed and
entertained by the Opera Group's latest premiere than I expected to be. And touched
as well. In its gentle, understated and small-scale way - just six in the cast
and twelve in the pit - The Lion's Face finds a way of saying something
profound and moving about the condition in which so many of us will spend our
final years.
The
title refers to the supposedly impassive leonine expression of many dementia sufferers.
But there's nothing impassive about Dave Hill's brilliantly portrayed Mr D, the
central figure in Glyn Maxwell's libretto. As snow falls outside the care home
to which he's confined, he is pathetically trying to make out the blotted landscape
of his own memories.
He
is troubled by some wispy recollection of a painful boyhood experience: a birthday
party, elliptically suggested by a jerky home movie in John Fulljames's resourceful
staging. Yet he cannot put his memory into the cogent words that will mean anything
to his loyal but despairing wife (Elizabeth Sikora) or his carer (Rachel Hynes;
pictured on the right, with Sikora and Hill) or the doctor (Benedict Nelson,
particularly intense and impressive) who is so desperately trying to "think the
thought that will light the sky" for his benighted patients.
Only
a chance meeting with a bubbly schoolgirl who intuitively enters his world (Fflur
Wyn, uncannily convincing) unites the old man with his boyhood self and temporarily
brings relief to his troubled mind.
This
work is too deeply rooted in real-life observation to offer superficial answers
or false hope. Hill's extraordinary performance is confined to abrupt shards of
fragmented speech. The rest of the cast sing a disturbingly vivid score by the
young London-based Russian composer Elena Langer. Full of surreal pastiches, nightmarish
scurrying, frightening eruptions, eerie treble voices and disorientating timbres,
it is a highly impressive attempt (admirably conducted by Nicholas Collon) to
express in aural terms the turmoil inside a mind that has become permanently unhinged
from rational thought, or indeed from its own sense of self.
Further
performances of this courageous piece this week in Newcastle; then in Watford,
Cardiff, Cheltenham and at the Linbury Theatre in London. Unsensational, even
matter-of-fact, it nevertheless focuses unflinchingly on the terrifying void into
which consciousness disintegrates in millions of lives.
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