Iford Arts open their final summer at Iford Manor with the crazy, bitterly comic operetta Candide: a fitting chance to pay tribute to Leonard Bernstein in his centenary year, and an ideal challenge for the signature high-octane brilliance of director Jeff Clarke. His whirling, high-energy collaboration between Iford Arts and Opera Della Luna packs every possible punch in a furiously creative evening of constant costume changes, an endlessly reassembling set, and above all a blazing sense of commitment from his fine cast, boasting some exciting new talent alongside seasoned professionals.
Candide is a violent protest against ‘perfect’ philosophical solutions to the insoluble problem of human life: it doesn’t shy away from shock, with rape, murder and moral devastation looming large in the back story (and plot arc) of almost every character. Candide’s endless, troubled travels feel like a parable of life itself, as he learns the farcical nature of optimism, clawing his way through sudden deaths and accidental killings, heading desperately and inexorably for disillusionment. The violence throughout is histrionic, yet hideously plausible: such cycles of human trafficking and murder continue in our own war-torn world. Candide takes us through a surreally exaggerated, callous journey of exploitation, in which the hypocrisy and cruelty of our world is sarcastically, angrily portrayed; but Bernstein closes Candide on a calmer note, as his surviving characters ultimately reject wealth and power to settle into simple kibbutz life hoping for happiness in the rural idyll. “Neither pure nor wise nor good, we’ll do the best we know… and make the garden grow,” our characters finally resolve, as relieved as we are to embrace the exhortation of six dead, deposed kings who encircle Candide in gondolas to dispense the true wisdom of experience. As to precisely how Clarke gets six gondolas to float simultaneously in Iford’s tiny cloister – just wait and see. It’s a feast of ingenuity and fun; often darkly disturbing, sometimes frankly shocking. The pace never falters.
Bernstein and his collaborator, playwright Lillian Hellman, took Voltaire’s satirical novel as the ideal instrument to ridicule complacent 1950s America, in which Joseph McCarthy had wreaked havoc with his persecution of supposed Communists: Hellman herself had been blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We’re not in America here, but travelling the globe with our hero Candide on a set which dynamically evolves into Westphalia, Venice, Paraguay, Eldorado and beyond: Jeff Clarke and Elroy Ashmore’s clever design uses Iford’s central well as a fulcrum into which different pieces of set can be slotted, producing a castle, a ship, a scaffold, and even Montevideo (complete with Georgian facades and feather-duster palm trees) in seconds, with scenery managed by the cast themselves, who often change costume on stage. The vehemence of the libretto means that original vituperative rejection of McCarthyism never quite dies away: we may not be in America, but America (and its tendency towards self-deluded moral evangelism) is in the very bones of this piece. Voltaire is embodied across the cast as narrator, signified by thick, black-rimmed glasses donned by different characters in turn.