Betrayal (I Fagiolini) - a review

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 16^th 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.