In a small seaside town in Spain, on a grubby campsite near the beach, lust and murder – opera’s two key ingredients – are fomenting under the sweltering sun, pulling a smalltime official, a successful novelist, an unsuccessful poet, a homeless opera singer and a champion figure skater into a taut net of mutual suspicion and obsession. Roberto Bolaño’s 1993 novel La Pista de Hielo has been transformed into David Sawer’s new opera, commissioned by Garsington: The Skating Rink.
Bolaño’s multi-layered, untrustworthy narrative shards are refined by skilled librettist Rory Mullarkey into a triple retelling of a murder from three compelling viewpoints: the opera divides into the stories of Gaspar, Remo and Enric, the three male protagonists linked together by the final crime. The stage action, thanks to the nuanced repetition of scenes from one account to another, reveals the synergies and gaps between their shared memories of one very dark summer. Mullarkey’s simple, potent libretto sometimes plugs straight into Bolaño in translation, but elsewhere condenses or intensifies the novel’s erratic moods, discovering moments of pure drama as our damaged characters roll from crisis to crisis. As lives and ideals unravel, delusion and disillusionment become key themes: this opera questions how society fails individuals, how we force and fail each other in life, and “Why do we always hurt the ones we love?”, as the homeless Rookie (a magnificently rasping, deliberately gravelly Alan Oke) asks poignantly in the final scene.
Director and designer Stewart Laing uses coloured Perspex and a fluttering back wall of enormous fly screen ribbons to channel a modern, wipe-clean and disposable holidaymaking idyll in which omnipresent policemen do nothing useful, often eating ice creams or drinking beer, while a scruffy population of tattooed holidaymakers and homeless addicts float idly from bar to bar. A large Perspex box on wheels doubles as security room, municipal office, hotel room and finally prison cell. A single neon star glows blue over most of the action, while a boardwalk and a little sand at the front edge of the stage suggest the beach. The stage itself, brilliantly, is a white plastic expanse which turns out to be a skating surface, where the grace and elegance of Nuria’s art form is brought to life in silence by skater Alice Poggio; lighting by Malcolm Rippeth suggests heat and ice by turns. Huge wooden packing cases litter the edges, allowing singers to hide and watch one another in the ruined Palacio Benvingut, the site of the clandestine skating rink, while tents are pitched both on stage and in Wormsley’s gardens outside as Remo’s campsite. Laing’s production uses the whole space, exploiting the visual openness of Garsington’s glass box opera house and lack of proscenium arch: we are in this town too, as singers swing out over the orchestra pit to run up amongst us in the steep auditorium in attempts at escape, or pursuit, of foe or friend.