When the director Graham Vick died in 2021, one feared for the future of Birmingham Opera Company, the community-based organisation with which he had created such memorable music theatre over more than 20 years. But BOC is carrying on, following Vick’s all-inclusive principles, and the first production of its new era is Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s agit-prop cantata Die Massnahme, which in John Willett’s English translation becomes The Decision. Directed by Anthony Almeida, it’s staged in one of the shabby post-industrial spaces that seem to abound in Birmingham, and which BOC seem able to find so unfailingly.
Written in 1930, The Decision tells the story of four agitators who are dispatched from Soviet Russia to foment revolution in pre-communist China. En route they meet a young sympathiser who offers to be their guide, but when they return to Moscow, they confess that they were forced to execute him when his enthusiasm threatened their mission; in recounting their story they ask whether their brutal actions were justified. The central committee (the chorus) determines that the agitators had made the right decision, and that as a result they had been able to spread Marxist teaching and the “ABC of Communism”.
The cantata presents the parable as a series of dialogues with punctuating songs, choruses and incidental music by Eisler, with a solo singer, three actors, a chorus and a small ensemble. It’s more didactic than theatrical, and Almeida’s production uses all the tics and tropes that have come to characterise BOC’s shows – the audience is involved from the start, encouraged to wear something red to signify that they too belong to “The Party”, with the action taking place around them on a series of mobile platforms. The mostly amateur chorus and horde of extras are as always hugely committed, the central cast of four – mezzo Wendy Dawn Thompson and actors Aimee Berwick, Paksie Vernon and Therese Collins – handle the text with as much naturalism as its formulaic assertions allow, while music director Alpesh Chauhan gives the musical numbers just the right brassy brittleness. But the whole presentation lacks finesse, with arbitrary, often meaningless gestures and movements that sometimes seem almost a parody of previous BOC productions.
In part the problem is the work itself. The Decision is, after all, a Lehrstück, a “teaching play”, which doesn’t permit the dramatic licence that allowed the company to create such thought-provoking stagings of the mainstream operas it has presented before. The result is two dimensional, strident, dramatically obvious and fatally unmoving.
