Seville Partnership

PUBLICATION DATE 19 SEPTEMBER 2011
Written for londonist.com



At Londonist Towers, our fondness for Wilton’s – the last surviving ‘grand musical hall’ in the country – knows few bounds.  We love its raffish ‘beautiful state of disrepair’ auditorium, its varied repertoire and its super nice cheap bar.

The shabby chic auditorium is so adaptable and for this week’s performances of Carmen it could so easily have been a flamenco dancehall in early nineteenth century Seville.

It finds an ideal partner in soprano Kate Flowers’ dedicated Co-Opera Company.  Based in an unpromising industrial estate in Sydenham, like Wiltons it’s unsupported by any public funding but manages to offer intensive vocal training and workshops to promising singers through an inventive sponsporship scheme which anyone can join.

The singing is mostly excellent and the acoustic makes it all so clear and understandable – even for a Swedish Escamillo and Rumanian Carmen who emphasise the international scope of the company.  Some of the voices take time to warm up, but the ensemble pieces are as pleasurable as the arias with Tom Lowe, Catherine Rooney, Felicity Buckland and particularly Alex Duliba enriching their quartet of supporting roles with bravura performances, and Ian Beadle brilliantly and confidently doubling Zuniga and Morales.

This is a very ‘polite’ production: Carmen done by the West Wittering Young Conservatives, perhaps. Adriana Festeu looks and sounds more Samantha Cameron than a cigarette-factory spitfire, and despite his lovely and strongly sustained lyric tenor, Michael Scott is too scarily Boris Johnson to convince as headstrong soldier Don Jose.

It’s delightful to hear the voices supported by an excellent sixteen-piece orchestra but the acting lets the side down under William Relton’s awkward direction. It’s quite an achievement to mount Carmen with a cast of just nine, and they all work extremely hard, but  when you think how much more was delivered in the same space by the Union’s Iolanthe, it might do this company a service if they could hook up with some of London’s more imaginative fringe theatre directors to put a spark into the staging and characterisations.

Really dirty kitchen sink drama

Clenching your cheeks to maintain equilibrium on a collapsible chair in the teeniest of London's fringe venues, it's not hard to believe you're a visitor to the abject little flat occupied by washed up opera singer John McLachlan in 'Bright Is The Ring Of Words' at Wilton's. After all, we are perched on the grottier edge of Limehouse and walking home in the moonlight I wondered how many similar unwanted and unloved pensioners were stacked in the tenements of Tower Hamlets I passed on the way to the station.

The opening banter follows a familiar pattern between the elderly and defiantly unwashed and the fussily dutiful carer who despairs at the filth and the adandonment of standards. So far so 'Steptoe and Son' except that John Garfield-Roberts plays Stanley as a mumsy recidivist whose combination of Lancastrian homilies derived from his beloved 'Nan' and occasional eruptions of violent anger are both wholly credible and endlessly watchable.

Jeffrey Mayhew never shies away from the actualities of his character's complete abandonment of personal standards. Retching and drooling and occasionally immobilized in a helpless contortion of pain and exhaustion, he engages the audience's curiosity and sympathy but spiked with an intellectual acerbity that keeps it mercifully free from pathos.

Although there are some great lines, and the comic moments are well-delivered, it's the authenticity of the central performances that holds your attention, and both the struggle over the alcoholic's grasp on the vodka bottle and the final catastrophe seemed entirely real to me.


This review written for www.remotegoat.co.uk