Journeying Boys at Guildhall School

Dominic Sedgwick and Adam L Sullivan as Britten and Auden
photo Matt Holliday

What do you get when you put both Britten and Rimbaud on stage together with only Britten's setting of Les Illuminations to link them. This was the challenge set by Iain Burnside's new play Journeying Boys which was staged by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama last night (8 November) in the new theatre at Milton Court. The work was performed by a large cast of singers and pianists, and here lies the clue to the work's raison d'etre. In a conservatoire it is important for students to pick away at the various onionskin layers of the work, meanings in Rimbaud's text, meanings in Britten's music, historical backgrounds, why Britten set Rimbaud's text and Journeying Boys came about partly as a challenge from Nick Sears the head of vocal studies at the Royal College of Music where Journeying Boys premiered in February.

Burnside takes three entirely separate strands of plot, Britten's relationship with W.H.Auden culminating in Auden's famous letter to Britten in 1942; Rimbaud's relationship with Verlaine culminating in Verlaine's trial, their split and Rimbaud's journey to East Africa; forming the glue between these is a group of present day music students studying and performing Verlaine settings notably Britten's songs but also Debussy and Faure. In both historical strands we have a relationship and a journey, with Britten journeying to the USA to visit Auden and then, journeying back, Rimbaud and Verlaine travel to London and Brussels, it is in London that much of Rimbaud's Illuminations is written.

Burnside runs the Auden/Britten and the present day strands pretty straightforwardly but his Rimbaud/Verlaine strand dots about in time. The whole piece starts with Rimbaud dying and dictating a letter to his sister (including a completely non-existent place). All of the letters that Burnside uses are completely true as is the play's most outrageous moment, when Rimbaud masturbates into a cup of milk and then gives it to his then lover to unwittingly drink.

The glass of milk moment - Steffan Donnelly, Bertie Watson, Joanne Evans, Jevan McAuley as Rimbaud and friends
photo Matt Holliday

The whole play is effectively about the creative disjunction between the personalities of Rimbaud and Britten, towards the end of the play Rimbaud recites part of an important letter he wrote about how an artist had to experience everything, and push the boundaries to become a seer. By contrast we see Britten hesitating to go into a Turkish Bath with Christopher Isherwood, nervous of letting go. It is part of Burnside's brilliance that he can see something of the Rimbaud 'method' in Auden's letter to Britten and in fact he has both Auden and Rimbaud reading the letter to Britten.

Another streak of brilliance is that the play is very funny and, like the episode with the milk, Burnside wears his learning lightly and ensures we are both challenged and amused. The young modern day students give a platform for thoughts and suggestions about the linking between the two great geniuses, but they are also characters in their own right and experimenting with their own forms of love and relationship.

Anyone who has seen one of Burnside's plays before will be familiar with his method, the music and the songs are split up and allocated to various performers, with Les Illuminations sung by various singers, as well as in ensemble. We hear other songs of Britten's from the 1930's and 1940's though Burnside was a little too reliant on the 1944 choral piece A Shepherd's Carol with extraordinary words 'O lift your little pinkie and touch the winter sky'.

When Verlaine was in jail in Brussels we heard him singing RVW's The sky above the roof (a setting of Mabel Dearmer's translation of Verlaine), as well as two of Faure's Verlaine settings (Spleen and Une Sainte en son aureole) and Debussy's Chevaud de bois. (Another delightful point brought into the play was mother-in-law as the piano teacher to the young Debussy).

The cast were lead by two recent graduates from the Guildhall School, Steffan Donnelly and Paapa Essiedu. Donnelly was remarkably vivid and life-like as Rimbaud, whist Essiedu played his African servant Djami. Both Donnelly and Essiedu are acting alumni, the remaining cast were all undergraduate and post-graduate singers and pianists (the pianists were expected to sing and act too), in total a cast of 27 people, bringing to life the people around Rimbaud and Britten as well as students, plus the five vowels! Rimbaud wrote a poem characterising the vowels, and Burnside brought them to life as five young women who accompany Rimbaud on his journey, a way of bringing Rimbaud's extraordinary thought processes to life.

Performances were strong from everybody, with Dominic Sedgwick as Britten, Adam L Sullivan as Auden and Gethn Lewis as Isherwood, all delightfully accurate. In France, Dominic J. Walsh was perhaps a little too personable as Verlaine, with Agathe Peyrat as his wife and Roisin Walsh as his mother in law.

The play will probably not have life outside a conservatoire, the cast is simply too big, but Burnside and the students vividly brought the fascinating conjunction of Britten and Auden to life in a work which as both illuminating, challenging, entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny.

Elsewhere on this blog:

• WIN a copy of Music: The Definitive History our latest Competition
• Taking Music Further - Orchestras Live conference
• Giorgio Berrugi at Rosenblatt Recitals
• Handel's Israel in Egypt at the Royal Hospital
• Lily Afshar and the Collaborative Orchestra
• Sheer delight - Gallay horn trios and quartet - CD review
• Sweet indeed - Douce France - Anne Sofie von Otter - CD review
• Mesmerising and Magical - Breaking the Rules - BREMF
• 40th Birthday - Tallis Scholars in Taverners Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas - CD review
• Music and Murder - Passion and the Princess - Musica Secreta at BREMF
• We take a second, longer look at Les Vepres Siciliennes at Covent Garden
• Imaginative programme - Francesco Meli in Liszt and Britten - CD review
• Home

Peer Gynt at the Barbican

Henrik Klausen as Peer Gynt
in 1876

There never really was a definitive version Peer Gynt during Grieg's life-time. He didn't even attend the first performance in 1876 when his music was played with Ibsen's play for the first time. He was unhappy with the artistic compromises he'd had to make to satisfy the orchestra (a small pit-band of 35) and provide cheap theatrical effects. Some of the movements require a full romantic orchestra and it was only at the performances in Copenhagen 1886 that he was able to flesh out the orchestration for a full sized orchestra. But here the music included three of the Norwegian Dances, Op. 35 and the Norwegian Bridal Procession. Grieg himself continued to tinker with the music and there was never a complete edition published in his lifetime. It was, amazingly, only in 1988 that a definitive edition was produced. Musicologist Finn Benestad's edition restored the music to a state that never really existed. He used the order and content of that original 1876 performance, but with the Copenhagen orchestration and a few corrections Grieg made late. On disc, perhaps, a variorum approach can be usefully taken, but for his performances of the music in the dramatic context of Ibsen's play at the Barbican on 16 December 2012 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers, conductor Mark Minkowski chose to use Benestad's edition, with actors from the Guildhall providing extracts from Ibsen's play directed by Alain Perroux.

A Soldier and a Maker

Iain Burnside's play, A Soldier and a Maker, arose out of the idea of interleaving Ivor Gurney's songs with texts from his poems and letters. This developed into a full length play which combines Gurney's words and songs along with other material from family and friends, plus his medical records, all woven together into a dramatic structure by Burnside. Burnside has worked on the song repertoire at the Guildhall School of Music over the years. A Soldier and a Maker is in some ways a development of Lads in their Hundreds, Burnside's fully-staged anthology of songs about war and warfare which developed with singers at the the Guildhall School.

GSMD presented A Soldier and a Maker at the Pit, in the Barbican, rather than in the school itself. We saw the premiere on Friday 20th April. Richard Goulding, a former student at GSMD, played Ivor Gurney with students from GSMD playing all other roles and playing the piano; two students played roles in the play, sang and accompanied the songs.

The play, in 2 acts lasting around 1 hour each, was essentially a direct narrative taking Gurney from his native Gloucestershire, to the RCM, to the Western Front, back to the RCM and finally into a mental institution. But the structure was flexible, so that the piece opened with Gurney in the Dartford mental institution and events overlapped. Quite often there were soldiers present, as images from Gurney's mind.

Burnside directed with designs by Guiseppe and Emma Belli. The set was a simple and flexible structure using half a dozen panels each of which bore part of a stunning image in which the designers had interleaved the trees of Gurney's native Gloucestershire with the blasted heath of the Western Front; the complete image was repeated in the floor.

Songs were split between singers and sometimes sung by a group, according to the dramatic context. The songs were part of the narrative flow, sometimes being sung by characters in the drama, sometimes used to accompany the drama and sometimes an indication of what is going on in Gurney's head. It is always difficult to treat mental illness and the complexities of what happens in an artists head, but by interleaving text and songs, Burnside helped us to glimpse the problems and troubles of the Gloucestershire genius.

The action moved between Gloucester, the Royal College of Music, the Army and the hospitals. In Gloucester, Ciaran O'Leary and Holly Marie Bingham were profoundly unsympathetic as Gurney's brother and sister-in-law, giving a troubling counterpoint to Gurney's illness. Gurney's sister Winifred (Bethan Langford) cropped up periodically, out of time, with the text taken from Winifred's candid letters to one of Gurney's early biographers.

At the RCM the students were portrayed as being rather patronising to Gurney, with Herbert Howells (Nicholas Allen) forming something of an almost comic but unsympathetic figure. Jennie Witton was outstanding as Marion Scott, Gurney's long-time friend and supporter; one of the few people to continue visit Gurney when he was in the Dartford mental institution.

The soldiers in Gurney's troop were described to us via his letters, and the war scenes used Gurney's poetry, sometimes recited by the men as a group, a device which I did not feel quite worked; but these scenes brought out the way the war combined horror and humour and the unlikeliness of Gurney writing poetry and songs in the trenches.

Gurney's mental instability was portrayed as almost an extension of the way he felt the need to be connected to the Gloucester countryside. His suicide attempts and descent into some sort of madness, were portrayed in scenes that were profoundly moving and immensely troubling. Using the songs helped us get to know more of Gurney, whereas a simply spoken play would have been able to go less deeply.

The performances were all uniformly strong; perhaps not all the singers were quite up to top lieder standard, but in terms of dramatic delivery and commitment to the words, they could not be faulted. Diction was uniformly excellent and you never felt the need for any crib.

Richard Goulding gave a towering performance as Gurney, complete with Gloucestershire accent, a visceral physical presence who was on stage virtually all the time. A tremendous achievement.

The end, where Gurney alone in his room in the mental institution, is gradually surrounded by the rest of the cast, characters from his past, all singing his song 'By a Bierside', was profoundly moving. The piece will be performed at the Cheltenham Festival in July, but both the piece and these performances deserve a far wider audience.

The Habit of Art

Off to the National Theatre last night to see Alan Bennett's new play, The Habit of Art with Richard Griffiths and Alex Jennings. The fact that it is a play within a play meant that Bennett managed to mix in some profoundly funny lines, involving Rent Boys and all sorts of things, but also consider the profundities of creating a work of art. This latter was also a duality because at the centre of act 2 is a discussion between Auden (Richard Griffiths) and Britten (Alex Jennings) about the creating of Death in Venice which Britten is nervous about and Auden feels that Myfanwy Piper's libretto misses the point. Auden(Griffiths) also made an interesting point, that no-one hears the libretto and that its function is not to be heard but to inspire and usher in the music, the libretto should challenge the composer.

The Auden character raises an interesting point, that for Britten the Dionysius figure should be a schoolboy figure in blazer and whites; perhaps someone should do a production with a young looking baritone so that the dialogue between Apollo and Dionysius could be between two school-boys, both candidates for Britten's desire.

But overlaying this discussion is the fact that we are witnessing a rehearsal of the play, complete with Stage Manager (Frances de la Tour) so we have two levels of discussion about the strains of creating a work of art.

I much enjoyed the play and found it very thought provoking. Perhaps more than usual as it rather fed into my anxieties about my own new opera which is going to go into rehearsal later this year. So a very apt time to see a play about the problems of creating an opera.

In the first half Britten/Jennings does not really have a function in the plot, so the actor playing Britten has various pieces of business and occasionally accompanies a choir boy singing bits of Britten (The Ash Grove, parts of Turn of the Screw); the idea being the Britten is auditioning a choir boy for his next work. The young man singing (one of three listed in the programme) performed nicely.
Certainly a recommended event, though I would have been interested in the dynamic if the actor playing Auden (originally scheduled to be Michael Gambon), had actually looked like Auden

Twelfth Night

The Royal Shakespeare Company are currently presenting Gregory Doran's production of Twelfth Night at the Duke of York's Theatre in London. We caught the play on Friday 10th Jan. Perhaps the most talked about feature of the production is Richard Wilson playing his first Shakespeare play at the age of 73. Wilson plays Malvolio, but is best known for playing the character of Victor Meldrew in One Foot in The Grave.

Doran sets the play firmly in Illyria, which became the Balkans, in the early 19th Century (i.e. the period when Byron was visiting the area). The leading players wear early 19th century costume and the others all wear local, traditional costumes. These looked authentic, the sort of clothing and accoutrements that you could buy from Joss Graham. To increase the authentic feel of the locale, Paul Englishby's music had a strong ethnic feel to it. I am not sure that Englishby got the sound quite right, I rather suspect that the Clarino would have been used; at least the instrument is prevalent in Greek folk musik. But that is a minor point, Englishby's music both played live on stage and behind the scenes went a long way towards establishing the correct atmosphere. The Duke (Jo Stone-Fewings) had a band of musician's at his disposal on stage, all gorgeously clad and Ashley Taylor-Rhys (who played Curio) also doubled as an instrumentalist.

Of course the play is most famous for the songs, written for the jester Feste (Miltos Yerolemou). Here I was not quite as impressed. Yerolemou's voice seemed to have just two settings, either a West End Musical bark (which he used sparingly) or a rather weak, husky tone. It was this latter which he used for most of the songs and this came over as rather unfocussed. At least one of the songs seemed to have a vocal line which was too elaborate for Yerolemou's comfort, which rather marred the performance, especially as it was doubled by an instrument. Yerolemou was however performing the songs in the character of Feste, so there is also the element of whether Doran and Englishby wanted the sound to be casual and less than perfect.

What I really want is a counter-tenor or high tenor singing with just a lute accompaniment in these songs. But I suspect that few actors capable of playing Feste have the requisite voice and that few counter-tenors or high tenor's would be interested in playing Feste in a long run of a play. It has to be said that Yerolemou made a strong and touching Feste, part of a brilliant ensemble cast.

Reviews rather tended to concentrate on Richard Wilson, but in fact it was the ensemble nature of the playing which impressed and the way Wilson did not really dominate. Though he did bring elements of Victor Meldrew with him. The comic sections with Sir Toby Belch (Richard McCabe) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (James Fleet) were rather less annoying than usual.