What is in Kelvin's Head?

Opera Review – Macbeth – Scottish Opera

26/03/2014

Here’s my review of Scottish Opera’s latest production, as posted at Opera Britannia. The exclamation marks are obviously not my own and have been added by an editor.
Rating:

Scottish Opera’s revival of Dominic Hill’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth is something of a mixed bag that is saved by several confident performances, most notably that of Elisabeth Meister as Lady Macbeth. Before we think about the singing though, we must discuss the curtain. By understanding the curtain, we can understand the whole of this production!

Scottish Opera is currently out of its usual Theatre Royal base in Glasgow whilst that theatre has major improvement work undertaken. This show took us across the river to the Citizens Theatre where simply due to the relative sizes of the buildings, any show is going to seem much smaller and more intimate. Now, the Theatre Royal has pretentions to the grand whilst the Citzens wears its faded grandeur with pride. And walking into the theatre we find that someone has unravelled a piece of string across the stage and hung a grime-laden piece of cloth inelegantly across the stage. The cloth itself looks as though it has been dragged around every venue in Scotland. It looks so grubby and untidy that one wonders whether someone has dragged it through Birnam Wood itself. The string sags in the middle and the curtain droops. It is a metaphor for what we will see unfold from a company that one fears has itself got a case of the droop.

For this production has indeed been all around Scotland and on the first night of this revival it was already feeling a little tired. It transpires that the production is a revival not of a main stage show but of a much pared down Macbeth, which was part of Scottish Opera’s commitment to tour opera to small and often unlikely venues in 2005 with a small band of seven singers and only a piano for accompaniment. In this revival the piano is gone, to be replaced by a small orchestra of just 18 players (a larger band is due in Edinburgh) making it difficult to decide whether we are seeing something that is essentially a big show cut to the bone or an already emasculated production being beefed up.

The curtain barely covers the set which itself only covers the lower half of the stage, the back walls clearly visible beyond. The set itself, such as it is, doesn’t do much to distinguish one place from another. It is a grungy, dirty interior – somewhere in a war zone. This is to be a production of Verdi’s version of the Scottish Play in Scotland by Scottish Opera that makes no reference to Scotland.

So…….on to the singing. (more…)

Elisabeth Meister, Macbeth, review, Scottish Opera

7 responses to “The Archbishop, the gays and their sins”

fakepete

25/02/2015

Nicely put, he seems to feel entitled to freedom from criticism. It’s a censorious attitude that I thought the CoE put behind it when most of us learned to laugh at the Life of Brian and it is contradicted by the church’s own call to participation in democracy.

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Andrew

25/02/2015

The poor old Arch. He really is an old school establishment man who cant really understand where the deference has gone. The Green Report, the other Reports on the ‘future’ of the Church of England and the ‘Conversations’ all speak of a deeply controlling man who is deeply frustrated that there is no control to be had any more. When the split comes he will probably want to make what is left into a more confessional and defined group (the evangelicals have always wanted that) but I suspect the Church that will emerge will be more liberal than he likes even if it is outwardly more evangelical and enthusiast than the Church of England has been for a very long time

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1. fakepete
  
  27/02/2015
  
  @Andrew I’d switch that around. Justin Welby is someone who does not show deference to what has in Western society become The New Orthodoxy (definitions on a postcard please), this is why he provokes such puzzlement, and thus consternation and anger.
  
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2. Daniel Berry, NYC
  
  03/03/2015
  
  Andrew, I don’t see how that can be, really: he hasn’t the pedigree to be “an old school establishment man.” He’s a late vocation who had been a high-power figure in the corporate world–meaning he’s undoubtedly accustomed to having the last word.
  
  As to his attitudes toward gay people, I’m disgusted with him and the many others who accept the natural sciences’ contradiction of bible, but just can’t bring themselves to the same place with the behavioral and social sciences, and even with medicine itself–ignoring along the way that homosexuality is found in upward of 450 animal species besides our own. Otherwise they seem perfectly comfortable with dispensing with the savagery found in much of “holy scripture.”
  
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Dharma Nicodemus Cuthbert

26/02/2015

I love the line “who am I to judge them for their sins, if they have sins” makes us seem angelic compared to those who have children. Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together. Does this mean that he is disagreeing with orthodoxy, and we are not sinning by being together.
God bless all and may his words of love bring more, troubled, souls to him.

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1. JCF
  
  28/02/2015
  
  “Only one problem we, according to the bible commit sin just by being together.”
  
  I *think* you meant “according to false translations/interpretations of the bible…” (or should have meant).
  
  “Being together”: can we call sex, “sex”? If not, why not? [And can we call marital sex (same- or opposite-sex) “marital sex”?]
  
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Daniel Berry, NYC

03/03/2015

best line for me:

You say that stuff and you are going to get people observing that there’s a lot more archbishops who claim that gay people are their friends than gay people who claim archbishops are their friends.

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