“Matt Kellett’s baritone is rich and undulating, and soprano Grace Nyandoro is warm and bright”
La Bohème is basically the opera equivalent of Romeo and Juliet: a tragic love story, very accessible and (therefore) very overdone. If you’ve seen one opera, chances are very high that it’s this one. So I completely understand the impetus to upheave the production and give the audience something entirely unexpected. Director Mark Ravenhill has tried just that, setting up, not in nineteenth century Paris, but in a doctor’s staff room at a modern-day hospital.
I find this slightly confusing, because whilst we preface the opera with a scene in which Mimi is in a hospital surrounded by healthcare professionals in scrubs, the opening act of the actual opera has everyone playing their usual roles, one an artist, the other a writer, in their shared flat. Except, they’re still in the hospital staff room, still in scrubs. So presumably this is Mimi’s hallucination? It’s not entirely clear. And not to go on, but if you’re going to change the setting can’t you find an equally romantic replacement? Nineteenth century bohemian Paris is hard to beat, I’ll concede, but a hospital staff room, depressingly decorated with a bit of Christmas tinsel, is especially bleak.
As has come to be expected with King’s Head opera, the script has been entirely re-written with only occasional nods to the original. “Your tiny hand is frozen, let me warm it in mine”, for example, is now “Relax, your hands are freezing, we could just chill out for now”. There’s something slightly less placable about the contemporary script: where you might forgive a silly back-and-forth sung in Italian, or even a more formal English, it doesn’t sound quite so good sung in the modern vernacular: “Hey mate/Where’ve you been?/I got held up.” Or rather it simply plays for laughs, which gets a bit boring after a while.
So that’s all the naysaying, I think. The performances themselves are sublime. We’re warned at the start of the evening that someone is singing through a cold, but I don’t quite catch who, and whilst I might have my suspicions (a few ‘M’s turn vaguely to ‘B’s) I really couldn’t say for sure because all four singers are absolutely stunning. The two tenors, Philip Lee and Daniel Koek, both particularly shine in their dulcet falsettos; Matt Kellett’s baritone is rich and undulating, and soprano Grace Nyandoro is warm and bright. There’s a slight lack of sexual chemistry between Lee and Koek, but their caring for one another is believable enough, so that’ll do. Kellett and Nyandoro get the biggest laughs, unafraid to be physical and silly- at one point, Nyandoro has Kellett by his lanyard, walking him on all fours like a dog.
Co-writers Eaton and Lee have also tweaked the story to be a same-sex relationship (Mimi’s real name is now Lucas rather than Lucia) which works without a hitch- I can’t think of anything lost by doing this and it’s something rarely- perhaps never- seen in old operas. But I do wish that, rather than a hyper realistic Grindr match, it had been truer to the bohemian romance of the original with a genuine meet-cute.
With opera traditionally un-miked, it’s often actually quite hard to hear what anyone is saying, so performing in a little room like the King’s Head is absolutely ideal to really hear the singers. The modernising of the story is slightly convoluted, and loses a lot of the aesthetic romance usually inbuilt. But it doesn’t take away from the beautiful performances, nor the heart-breaking end.
“a passionate dialogue between two great minds, performed by two great actors”
“Do you count on your tomorrow’s? I do not” quips Dr. Sigmund Freud during the opening moments of Mark St Germain’s “Freud’s Last Session”. A BBC announcer has just echoed and crackled from the radio, detailing Hitler’s refusal to withdraw his troops from Poland. It is not the impending war, however, that gives the sense of ‘borrowed time’, but Freud’s terminal cancer that eats away at his health and his will to live.
Dr. Freud is addressing his question to C. S. Lewis who has come to visit him in his Hampstead home. It is an imaginary meeting: not improbable, but one that lets us into a riveting fantasy world to witness the conversations between two of the 20th century’s greatest academics. Lewis’s recent embrace of Christianity stands in stark contrast to Dr. Freud, whose atheist beliefs couldn’t be more different. The ensuing duel, in which words are the only ammunition, powerfully demonstrates the differences between the two men – in age, perspective and spirituality – but also how well matched they are. You can sense the mutual respect and appreciation as they each fight for their own intellectual (and in Freud’s case, literal) survival.
Crammed into the intimate back room of the King’s Head, the audience is a swarm of flies on the wall. Brad Caleb Lee’s design is part office, part practice room, juxtaposed with imagery from Freud’s mind splashed on the floor and the walls. This does not detract from the realism of the piece. Yet what essentially gives the play its authenticity is the impeccable performances from the two actors. Within minutes you forget you are in a theatre. Julian Bird, as Dr. Sigmund Freud, exudes the unseen bruises of a dying man while refusing to let his brilliant, active mind be dragged down by illness. An extraordinary performance in which every sinew is part of the role. Language and body language are inextricably married. Séan Browne’s C. S. Lewis is equally fascinating and steeped in authenticity. Arriving late for the meeting he is initially diffident and perhaps aware that he might be out of his league here. But as the couple lock horns his arguments reach higher ground. The cut glass (albeit chipped rather than clipped) English accent capture’s Lewis’s status perfectly. He has yet to write his famous works and is still finding his voice, but Browne wonderfully depicts a character who holds fast to the convictions of his beliefs.
Under Peter Darney’s direction, the script explores the beliefs of both men like a choreographed sparring match. Amid the air raid sirens, the two scholars debate religion, love, family, the existence (or non-existence) of God, the meaning of life and, of course, sex. Admittedly in an hour and a half you cannot dig too deep into the respective philosophies, but we get a pretty nutritious nutshell. “Things are only simple when we choose not to examine them”. Freud’s line is a reminder that we need to keep our attention focused. Low flying planes and radio bulletins punctuate the piece with reminders of the impending war, during which Browne betrays a shell-shocked vulnerability that adds further light and shade to Lewis’s puritanism. There is a touching, and graphic, moment when he tries to alleviate the physical pain Freud is in.
There is no real conclusion to the piece, but then again, the debate between believers and non-believers will never be resolved. Based on a passage from Dr. Armand Nicholi’s “The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life” we come away a little more enlightened. “It is madness to think we could solve the greatest mystery of all time in one morning” says C. S. Lewis. “Freud’s Last Session” doesn’t try to solve it in an evening either. But it does offer up a passionate dialogue between two great minds, performed by two great actors. It’s not an easy text to get right but they achieve it in a very real way with performances as precise as they are natural.
