Early-music vocal ensemble I Fagiolini recently
premiered their long-awaited follow up to the 2004 sensation ‘The Full
Monteverdi’. The original show, resulting from a collaboration between
Robert Hollingworth’s acclaimed vocal group and director John La Bouchardière,
reimagined Monteverdi’s fourth book of madrigals as an immersive piece of music
theatre, set in a restaurant at which the audience are also diners. This
new collaboration takes the same concept to the music of the 16th century composer Carlo Gesualdo; the
music known for its daring dissonance, the man for his infamous murder of his
wife and her lover.
The show, staged on its London leg in the Village
Underground in Shoreditch, is an ‘immersive dramatisation’ of Gesualdo’s music
and legend ‘set in hidden corners of real-life urban locations, Betrayal
investigates what could drive someone to such extremes.’
The show takes place in a railway arch, in near total
darkness, in a large space without any division of audience and performers and
with minimal set and props. Perhaps in 2004 some of this was
revolutionary, now it’s all very much par-for-the-immersive-theatre-course, even
in conservative classical music.
Each of the six singers of I Fagiolini is paired with
a dancer, forming a couple whose passion, infidelity and anger is expressed
through the music, dance and their interaction, isolated as they are from the
rest of the performers in their own section of the space. The intention,
I presume, is that the audience moves freely around, dipping into different
stories, but the cramped space it was very difficult actually to circulate,
meaning that most punters picked one couple and stuck to them, making the
experience more of a single play-let, rather than a series of interconnected
stories. Perhaps a larger space or fewer audience members would have
meant a more general experience.
The music, firstly, is remarkable - hearing so much
Gesualdo together gets one really dug into his twisted sound world, and hearing
the parts in isolation (or at least hearing one part right up close and the
others in the background, as one focusses on one performer) really accentuates
the unsettling nature of the harmonic language, pointing the dissonances with
resulting almost physical effect on the audience. It's an amazingly
exciting way of hearing this music; I wish I'd seen The Full Monteverdi for
comparison, but I'd suggest that this show might be even more valuable to
Gesualdo's music than that was to Monteverdi's.
The voices are big and not as straight as purists
might expect but the tuning is scarily good, especially given the spadefuls of
mitigating factors; physical lack of proximity, dry acoustic, the physical
demands of the production and the sheer bloody difficulty of the music!
However, so far, so standard for an excellent group; what is really
exciting vocally is the sheer passion in the voices, at times uncomfortably raw
and admirably unafraid to explore ugliness in the sound – brave, committed and
utterly in service to the ensemble impact of the show.
The concept of the production in general is strong;
this is unsettling music and an unsettling and unsafe-feeling setting is very
appropriate. I’ll admit to being a bit of a cynic when it comes to some
of the more toe-curling tropes of immersive theatre (stern and belligerent
ushers dressed as security guards telling you sharply to ‘keep the noise down’
on entry, for instance) but an undeniable atmosphere is created from first
entry to the space. There’s a strong sense of voyeurism to the experience
which makes it feel grubby and seedy at times, again serving the music
admirably. On entry to the unlit space, littered with crime-scene
paraphernalia, audience members are handed a dim, blue torch with which to
snoop on the private lives of the characters, complicit in the disturbing
behaviour. Light-touch stewarding during the show means that audience and
performers are not separated - a ballsy decision from a production point of
view (one wonders how the performers feel about the risk-factors of this!) but one
which adds the frisson of having to get out of the way as a performer pushes
past, stopping the audience feeling comfortable or complacent at any point.
However this is all experiential dressing around a
rather empty dramatic centre. In the moment, the drama between baritone
Greg Skidmore and dancer Eleesha Drennan (the only couple I managed to watch at
any length) was effective. The dancer’s death from poisoning about
halfway through was beautifully and almost unwatchably visceral and the singer’s
vitriol while she was dying so effective that the whole section leaving one
quite breathless. There were moments of beauty from then on, palpable,
slow-creeping remorse and a moving moment when the singer wrapped the dancer’s
dead arms around him as though to mimic the devotion lost from her in life, but
in general the section following the death felt overlong and lacking in
momentum, direction limited and static, with the performers doing their best
with little to work with.
This interesting production is in so many ways a
success, with a solid concept and peerless performances, but somehow, it all
seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts.
