Tag Archives: Dominic Plummer

Minutes to Midnight

Minutes to Midnight

★★★★

Online

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Minutes to Midnight

Minutes to Midnight

Tête à Tête Opera Festival 2020 available online

Reviewed – 18th September 2020

★★★★

 

“From this unlikely subject matter, Sturt and Chapadjiev have created an extraordinary work of vivid contrasts”

 

Minutes to Midnight, Minute Hand Opera’s “avant-premiere” opera, with music by John Sturt and words by Sophia Chapadjiev, was created by a company working from locations as far apart as Chicago, New York and London. It’s a new opera that is part of a socially distanced live performance series at the Cockpit Theatre brought together by the Tête á Tête Opera Festival. But if you missed the September 16th performance in house, or the September 18th interactive broadcast online, don’t worry. Last night’s interactive broadcast will be available online for 28 days.

Minutes to Midnight is about two young American missileers—a term which describes the highly trained specialists who man the nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile systems in silos dug into American’s heartland. Martínez and Walker, aged 24 and 22, are on duty the night of the 2016 election, awaiting the outcome of a highly divisive election. As we soon discover, the job of missileer lacks the dangers of the battlefield, despite the fact that these young men are at the controls of the deadliest weapons of them all. Instead, the missileers’ job is a constant struggle to maintain alertness in isolation, and to overcome boredom. All the while being ready to turn the keys that could reduce the world to ashes. As a defence against the same daily routines, they play card games when not studying or resting. It’s a solitary life at the bottom of a hole in a landscape that battles extremes of temperature as the seasons change.

From this unlikely subject matter, Sturt and Chapadjiev have created an extraordinary work of vivid contrasts. With the help of video excerpts depicting a choir of female singers in summer dresses outdoors in pastoral landscapes, Minutes to Midnight begins with God’s creation of the world and brings us rapidly to the moment in 1945 when nuclear weapons were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The action then switches to a live broadcast of the two missileers in their silo, aka the stage of the Cockpit Theatre. As the missileers sing their story, they are periodically interrupted by director Eleanor Strutt, also on stage, who provides commentary on how Minutes to Midnight was created.

This production of Minutes to Midnight is forty minutes of what is obviously a much longer work. It is also an ingenious solution to the problem of bringing together a socially distanced cast and musicians for a limited amount of time. Given the subject matter, it’s a highly relevant nod to safe practices in both our nuclear and COVID-19 afflicted age. With safety concerns at the forefront, the audience, both socially distanced in the theatre, and online, is free to focus on the opera. The video chorus of the Trinity Set—Kerry Firth, Anna Marmion, and Kate Robson—is appropriately celestial in tone. Lawrence Gillians, as First Lieutenant A.J. Martínez, and Andrew Woodmansey, as Second Lieutenant Joseph Walker, on stage, are also very good as the young missileers. The musicians and the Radio Announcer (Mike Sturt) are all pre-recorded, but effective. Sturt’s music is the perfect foil for Chapadjiev’s libretto, covering a range of experiences from God’s creation of “tigers and beasts and dinosaurs” to the missileers’ mundane (and profane) experience of life in the silos. “It’s fucking freezing down here” and “winter nips at my balls” are just a couple of memorable lines in an opera that depicts life on the American plains. This study in extreme contrasts is just one of the rewards of Minutes to Midnight.

It’s difficult to assess the whole work from excerpts of course, but the version of Minutes to Midnight that Minute Hand Opera produced for 2020 is absolutely worth 40 minutes of your time online. There’s also a panel discussion “Who Holds the Bombs?” that follows. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Claire Shovelton

 

Tete a Tete


Minutes to Midnight

Tête à Tête Opera Festival 2020 available online

Previously reviewed by Dominica:
Jason Kravits – Off The Top | ★★★★★ | Live At Zédel | January 2020
Us Two | ★★★ | The Space | January 2020
Crybabies: Danger Brigade | ★★★ | The Vaults | March 2020
Fireworks | ★★★ | The Vaults | March 2020
Luna | ★★ | The Vaults | March 2020
Our Man In Havana | ★★★★ | The Vaults | March 2020
Revisor | ★★★★★ | Sadler’s Wells Theatre | March 2020
Sky In The Pie | ★★★ | The Vaults | March 2020
The Revenger’s Tragedy (La Tragedia Del Vendicatore) | ★★★★★ | Barbican | March 2020
The Tempest | ★★★★ | Jermyn Street Theatre | March 2020

 

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Strange Fruit
★★★★

Bush Theatre

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Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit

Bush Theatre

Reviewed – 17th June 2019

★★★★

 

“Despite the lengthy playing time of this production, the audience was spellbound throughout”

 

In the wake of the Windrush scandal, it is a timely and welcome decision by the Bush Theatre to revive Caryl Phillips’ Strange Fruit. Written in the early 1980s and set at the same time, this intense family drama presents the story of a West Indian woman and her two adult sons as they confront the legacy of their past in the Caribbean, and an uncertain future in Britain. For Vivian, the mother, the past is a wrenching memory of a flight with two small boys, away from an alcoholic, abusive husband. Intelligent and hard working, Vivian sees Britain as a place where she can raise their sons in an environment that offers them safety from their father, and more educational and economic opportunity than can be found in their former home in the Caribbean. It is a dream that, at the very moment of fulfillment, turns into a nightmare.

Alvin, the older son, now a university graduate, has just returned from his grandfather’s funeral in the West Indies. Errol, his younger brother, is dreaming dangerous dreams of going to Africa with his pregnant white girlfriend, to become a “freedom fighter.” Meanwhile Vivian herself is continuing to work long hours as a teacher, without the promotions and recognition that her white colleagues, less experienced than she, have won. Her sons focus, not on her sacrifices for them, but on her failure to tell them the truth about their father, and cutting them off from their Caribbean roots. This is truly the story of a family caught between cultures.

As a young writer in the 1980s, Phillips handled the challenging material of Strange Fruit with the assurance that one would expect from a writer who later became an accomplished novelist. Despite the lengthy playing time of this production, the audience was spellbound throughout, a credit to Nancy Medina’s slick direction. Rakie Ayola as Vivian gave an accomplished performance, and she was ably assisted by Debra Michaels playing Vernice, her loyal West Indian friend and neighbour, who has resolutely hung onto the accent and the clothes of the Caribbean. Tok Stephen as Alvin gave a really outstanding performance as the son who has to confront the past that his mother fled from, and who returns to Britain determined to make a difference to his community if he can.

The only weakness of this triumphant revival is the set. Designer Max Johns created a minimalist, carpeted set with a square depression in the centre, almost like the so called “conversation pits” that were fashionable in American homes in the sxities and seventies. For a naturalistic drama like Strange Fruit, the decision to stage it in the round on this set has the curious effect, not of creating more intimacy, but of distancing the cast from the audience, and making the confrontations more muted. Other than that, this is a satisfying production. Recommended.

 

 

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Helen Murray

 


Strange Fruit

Bush Theatre until 27th July

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
Class | ★★★★ | May 2019

 

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