Stephen Pritchard writes:
Creativity sprouts in many different seedbeds. English Touring Opera’s (ETO) current season puts two wildly different hothouse flowers on display: Leoncavallo’s murderous melodrama Pagliacci, said to have its roots in a real-life court case, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, the fruit of a bitter falling-out between the two – surely the epitome of creative tension. But perhaps the most inventive piece on stage last week sprang directly from stony ground: the unforgiving streets of London.
A large, unauditioned cast had been brought together by Streetwise Opera, an award-winning company that aims to enable people who have experienced homelessness to find inspiration and self-confidence while they rebuild their lives and identities. In workshops with director Anna Morrissey, musical director Aga Serugo-Lugo and composers Electra Perivolaris and Francesca Le Lohé, the cast of all ages took Pagliacci to pieces, reimagined it in the light of their own lives and honed a fast-moving 15-minute drama that served as a curtain-raiser to ETO’s new production of this verismo classic.
Ideas for melodies and text suggested by the cast were fashioned into a musical narrative that stripped down the action to the dilemma of Nedda, the talented yet downtrodden wife of jealous, controlling Canio, the clown in a group of travelling players. With an egalitarian approach to performance (no hierarchy of principals and chorus here), several individuals took turns to don a simple coat to denote that they were now one of the two central characters.
Should Nedda leave Canio for her lover?, asked the cast, over often beguiling writing for strings and woodwind, tenderly played by the ETO orchestra. Nedda appealed directly to the audience: “What would you do in my place?” Back came the answer from the cast: get out – the very opposite of Leoncavallo’s bloody conclusion. Nedda was now “free at last to tell my own story”, and through their upliftingly sincere performances we got the sense that those on stage – most for the very first time – were free at last too.
