Three years ago composer Tansy Davies and writer Nick Drake collaborated on Between Worlds, an opera set in the World Trade Center on 9/11, produced at the Barbican with English National Opera. Some felt the piece foundered on its choice of subject– that the tragedy was just too big to be contained on stage. But Davies and Drake disagreed, and their subject for their next work, commissioned for the London Sinfonietta’s 50th anniversary and staged with the Royal Opera, is if anything more ambitious.
Written for two singers and a handful of instruments, Cave looks on paper like a tiny chamber opera, yet it tries to tackle both a father’s grief and the idea of a dystopian future brought about by climate change in a piece lasting barely an hour. Even if it doesn’t entirely succeed, there’s a lot that makes the attempt memorable.
Printworks is an eerily deserted warehouse space in London’s Docklands, formerly home to newspaper printing presses and now repurposed as a nightclub and performance space. Entering this labyrinth of huge spaces, its windows blacked out, its ceilings impossibly high, is indeed like walking into some underground complex. In the opera, the cave is an ancient place where a dishevelled, desperate man somehow communes with the spirit of his absent daughter. The world outside has been struck colourless by environmental disaster, and the daughter, with “courage” tattooed on her arm, was set on helping fix it. Where she has gone, and whether she is really dead, are not explained, although in places Drake’s libretto is starkly expository, even preachy when it warms to its topic of ecological responsibility.
Lucy Bailey’s production plays out along the middle strip of a long, galleried room, with the audience either side, so close as to be able to smell the hallucinatory potion the man drinks, or get splashed by the rain that eventually falls. Jack Knowles’s lighting creates huge, ghostly silhouettes, or succinctly suggests changes of atmosphere with washes of colour.
Davies’s opening music establishes a sense of place immediately, layering low, ominous notes, a calming harp, and high, skittish figures. Perhaps there are bats overhead, but if so they are representatives of nature, not horror film set-dressing: the harp music, here and throughout, suggests peace and warmth, and the cave, though mysterious, also sounds like a place of safety. The man claps and whistles as if to test the size of the cave, and Davies’s electronic manipulations pick up the sounds and send them spiralling out beyond the ceiling. Held together by conductor Geoffrey Paterson, the music is transparent, brazenly beautiful and much use is made of the Sinfonietta’s players as soloists, weaving elaborate individual lines alongside the vocalists.
Tenor Mark Padmore gives a powerhouse performance as the Man, unsparing and unrelenting in its intensity. Vocalist Elaine Mitchener is an aptly mesmeric presence as the older manifestations of his daughter, though she can’t compete in terms of clarity and projection; we also glimpse the daughter as a little girl, danced by Akilah Mantock. Strangely, though, their performances might have more impact were their characters’ concerns a little pettier. If Davies were to write an opera on a smaller subject, or to tackle a big one in a more oblique way, the result might be no less universal, and no less important.
• Cave is at Printworks, London, until 23 June. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
