Jonathan Dove’s Itch at Opera Holland Park: the fascination of the elements

“Schoolchild chemistry nerd saves the planet” isn’t exactly a typical opera plotline. But contemporary opera is a broad church, and Jonathan Dove has form with unusual plotlines in the shape of Flight, about a refugee living in Charles de Gaulle airport. If an opera can appear entitled Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub, why not Itch, based on Simon Mayo’s Young Adult thrillers? Opera Holland Park’s commission first appeared in 2023 and received its first revival last night.

It’s difficult for many people – perhaps most people – to understand the depth of fascination and sense of exquisite beauty that maths and sciences can inspire, even in the very young. For those inspired in that way, explaining those emotions to one’s nearest and dearest can feel like an impossible task. So the opening of Itch is a piece of utter operatic virtuosity: our eponymous hero expounds his obsession with the periodic table of the elements to his sister and the audience (successfully) and his mother (with no success whatsoever). Dove gives Itch (Itchingham Lofte) music of great beauty which Xavier Hetherington sang with clarity and heartfelt poetry, with the character of each element brought out in its distinctive musical signature. I was choking back the tears.

Itch has two aces in its pack, the first of which is its characterisation. We are seeing ordinary characters from everyday life (the nerdy and vivacious children and their long-suffering parents, the schoolteachers good and bad) or from standard tropes (the evil corporate overlord), but they are drawn vividly and under Stephen Barlow’s attentive direction, you recognise each and empathise with all (except the obvious baddies). Hetherington is instantly recognisable as the introverted boy lost in his own world; Natasha Agarwal is delightful as his kleptomaniac sister who dearly loves her brother even if he drives her up the wall; Victoria Simmonds’ Watkins is everyone’s memory of a favourite teacher; James Hall’s surf-loving hippie Cake is the archetype of beard-and-sandals save-the-planet. Eric Greene and Rebecca Bottone are completely credible as the parents – the father who is never there when he’s needed and the mother who cannot understand her child; Bottone also does a sterling job as Roshanna Wing, the incarnation of corporate greed. The one exception – and it's an important one – is the character of Flowerdew, the schoolteacher turned villain who is a key driver of events and in whom I simply could not believe, in spite of Nicholas Garrett's best efforts.

The second ace is the timbral palette of Dove’s music, combined with the lyrical beauty that we have come to expect from him. At 13 musicians, the ensemble is relatively small, but with only three string players, there’s a lot of variety with which Dove can paint his sound pictures and display his unique ability to provoke emotion from each. Whatever the subject of the moment, the wonderment at the sparkle of cassiterite deep in a Cornish tin mine, the violence of chemical explosions, the excitement of the children at their discoveries or the despair of their father at arriving on the scene too late for the umpteenth time, Dove finds a combination of instruments to enthral you.

Matthew Scott Rogers and the City of London Sinfonia did a fine job of bringing out the myriad colours and there was some excellent singing. The top shout goes to Hall, whose incarnation of the child-of-nature care for the planet was delivered in a delicious countertenor with immaculate control of high-note vibrato. Bottone clearly enjoyed her moments of thwarted-bad-guy fury, expressed as some vicious coloratura at the top of her register. The design trio of Frank Bradshaw, Jake Wiltshire and Jack Henry James Fox produce a wonderful multi-purpose set in the shape of a three dimensional periodic table which can morph into many different spaces, neatly supplemented between the orchestra and audience by a space that can be child’s bedroom or Cornish beach .

The narrative, sadly, is not up to the same standard. It’s fine for a fantasy story to hang on a far-fetched premise such as “hippie beachcomber discovers new element which can provide energy for the world”, but the opera is so riddled with plot lacunae that I found the words “oh, for goodness sake” repeatedly leaping to mind as yet another step in the story seemed thoroughly implausible. I will confess, however, that I deeply enjoyed Flowerdew and his henchmen being psychedelically overcome by xenon fumes in their car.

So plaudits to OHP for expanding opera into new thematic territory, plaudits to Dove for endowing it with impossibly beautiful music, and plaudits to musicians, cast and crew for delivering it with such panache. I wish I could have found the story more absorbing from beginning to end, but I’m thrilled to have seen such a wonderful exposition of the fascination and beauty of science.