Flying Dutchman becomes chillingly contemporary in OperaUpClose treatment

Winner of OperaUpClose’s Flourish competition for new writing, The Blank Canvas is a heartbreakingly tragic tale of an abstract artist coming to terms with widowhood, success and some worrying hallucinations. 

OperaUpClose have set their version of Verdi’s classic in the 1920s, with some beautiful period costumes and a few prettily observed production details It’s a big story on a very small scale.

Donizetti’s melodramma giocoso in two acts, L’elisir d’amore, is a light-hearted tale of love overcoming all obstacles, with the help of a little “love potion”.

The King’s Head Theatre in Islington is, as one might suspect from the name, in the back of a pub. Founded in 1970, it was the first pub theatre to open in London since Shakespeare’s time. Housed in a back room that used to contain a boxing ring, it is tiny: tightly packed seating for maybe 60 or 70 people and an unelevated stage, beginning where the seating stops.

Having arrived earlier than I anticipated for this evening’s production of Puccini’s La Bohème by OperaUpClose, I took the opportunity to read through the libretto, helpfully provided in the form of a thin volume available for purchase. When I organise concerts, I often provide texts so that unclear diction is better understood, but this evening I didn’t look at the libretto once.

Music and politics combine to form a potent mix. Art in its exclusive pursuit, can arguably avoid making a political statement; but it can also shine a bitingly harsh light on political themes, thus bringing them close to home through personal acts of dramatisation. Manifest Destiny 2011 proudly does the latter.