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Covent Garden, 3pm, Tristan und Isolde, Bernard Haitink’s last performance at the Covent Garden.

Queued from 8:45 for the day tickets. this entailed getting up at 7am and catching the train in to London - easier said than done - especially when yo sleep really badly and the alarm doesn’t go off. Made it though, and did a quick head count while someone held my place for me. 58th in the queue, and there are 67 day seats.

No sign of emily and stewart. By the time they got there the queue had grown quite a bit and the people behind us were not very happy at the thought that I might be letting them into the queue, so they decided not to queue and to go and see something else instead. I felt guilty about that - sorry guys…

At 11am they opened the doors, counted off the 67 lucky people and made the rest of the queue stand against the other wall to wait for returns. At 3pm there were still some of them there. I don’t know if this is an ordinary occurrence or just because of the fact that it was Bernard Haitink’s last performance.

After I got my ticket I went to meet s&e and we sat in Leicester Square while they waited for half-tix to open. It was a beautiful sunnny day - people walking around in t-shirts and basking on the grass in the square. I was wearing a t-shirt too, and a jumper - and a jacket… Melbourne people would find it a lot easier to adjust to London, they’re already used to layering…

They couldn’t decide what to go see, so we went off to get some lunch, to the same pub that we had gone to on Friday, in soho. I had a stak and stilton pie and a pint - traditional english stodge, but just what I needed after a muesli bar for breakfast.

We went back to Leicester Square and they decided to go to Shockheaded Peter - the Tiger Lillies aren’t the band any more but I’m sure its still great.

It was now about 2:30 so I caught the tube back to Covent Garden and joined the crowds milling around in the foyer. Bought a program (5 pounds for a good hefty tome - australian ones are so overpriced) and went in to sit down.

My seat was stage left about 15m from the front of the stage at the same level. Slightly obstructerd view and I could only just read the surtitles on the nearest tv screen by craning a bit. But I was right level with the front of the orchestra and BH. The auditorium has just been completely rebuilt, and the acoustics are fantastic (I’m not sure if they were enhanced at all - I don’t think so), but it still has that amazing red velvet curtain with the crowns, that lifts and separates… If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take another look at the curtain at the start of Moulin Rouge, and remember that Baz Luhrmann is one of australia’s best opera directors.

Glance at the program - steersman - ‘Grant Doyle trained at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide…’. It’s a small world.

The orchestra was great from the first chord. Shock! surprise! horror! - horns can play in tune! I don’t know how they followed BH though - maybe they had some kind of telepathic link, because it seemed to me that they played about 3/4 of a beat behind the whole time. Maybe they were making allowances for the singers. I got used to it after a while and could actually watch him.

The production is ultra minimalist - Isolde on a large red raked platform, Tristan on a large purple raked platform. As the lovers emotions move around so do the platforms, until at the end of the first act, after they have taken the love potion which they think is poison, they reach to each other across the void to embrace in death, coming closer and closer as the music orgasms around them, until a scream from Isolde’s maid the platforms are thrust apart in a blaze of white light with the entrance of the king, to whom Isolde is promised.

The singing so far has been mostly Isolde - and Lisa Gasteen - from Brisbane - is great - very strong and expressive voice, and impressive feat of stamina. Tristan is not quite as strong, and seems to be struggling to get over the orchestra.

45 minute break. They are selling ice-cream in the foyer - a special one made in a creamery in surrey exclusively for the Royal Opera house. I have one and wander down the road for a panini, watching the police setting up for the BAFTA television awards at Drury Lane around the corner.

Back to the theatre - more Wagner. Isolde waits in the dark for the King, off hunting to be far away so that she can meet with Tristan. Finally he mounts his purple slab and drifts towards her, and they sing an amazingly passionate duet until, as the orchestra orgasms again, his voice cracks - and a chill runs up my spine. He gets little rest for the rest of the act, and I can see him swallowing to try and lubricate his throat. every time he sings I am on the edge of my seat, and I can hear him marking and trying to recover from each phrase in time for the next. Near the end of the act Wagner’s pressure relents a bit and he carris it off, but I’m quite scared for him. As the King breaks in again in his customary white revealing light (there’s a great play on light and dark in the libretto - i’m sure theres a web site on it if you’re interested) and discovers the two lovers on their slabs in the most platonic form of flagrante delicto I’ve ever seen he makes the obvious response with a 15 minute aria on how upset he is that his best friend has betrayed him. Then the evil Melot stabs Tristan and the act ends very suddenly and jarringly. (Wagner’s good at this - he does exactly the same thing at the end of act ii of Sigfried - where it is even more astounding as he changes key completely just for the last chord - a fantastic effect)

Unfortunately for our tenor, the structure of the opera is broadly:
Act I - Isolde sings for 1 hour 10, they sing 10 minutes of duet
Act II - Isolde sings for 45 minutes, they T&I duet for 30 minutes, King sings for 10
Act III - Tristan sings while dying for an hour and 10, and Isolde sings for 15 at the end (she’s not fat - just big boned)

The tenor who first sang the role died 2 weeks after the first season. I thought our tenor wasn;t going to last that long. He was really dying - his voice gave way about 20 minutes in and the rest was pure fear and willpower. On some of his high notes you could hear the rasp of his throat as a sub-harmonic - really really scary - and I had tears in my eyes and my head in my hands for much of the act. Every now and then he got a 5 minute break while Kurwenal (very good by Alan Titus) sang or the shepherd played his pipe (offstage oboe - really really well played) and for a few phrases he could do it, but by the end there was nothing left and I’m sure when he died it was with relief.

Finally Isolde arrives, and faints while everyone else on the stage kills each other or drink poison, only to wake to sing her last lament for Tristan as her red slab inches its way offstage. She has a voice, thank god - and it is over.

The audience gives most of its praise and its standing ovation to BH, and he looks moved as the lilys rain down from the gods. Only 5 and a half hours after I entered the auditorium its over, and its time to walk out into the stunning purple dusk and catch the train home.

The Almeida Theatre, up near King’s Cross, is one of my favourite places. Its an ‘off West End’ theatre with a reputation for interesting productions. It was here that I was ‘The Jew of Malta’ starring the guy who played the Emperor in ‘Return of the Jedi’. That was a great production.

For this production of King Lear the audience is seated in what appears to be a large wood-panneled room. We occupy two thirds of a space, and the stage is the last third.

Goneril, Regan and Cordelia are already on stage. It seems to be about 1930, and while Cordelia sits on the edge of the stage the others chain-smoke and pace the stage.

At last the King enters, and television lights illuminate him while he announces the division of the kingdom. As the sisters fawn for their thirds, the action is displayed on monitors overhead.

This now familiar stratagem is only used here, and soon the monitors disappear into the ceiling - using them seemed to me unnecessary.

The action proceeds in the single room, the direction effectively separating actions for each space. For example, Edmund’s stratagems against his brother and father take place by a lit fire stage right, with an armchair lending a cosy domestic feel to the setting.

Edmund’s histrionics seemed to me a bit strained - of all the actors I felt his performance was the weakest - I got more of a sense of an audition performance than character. ‘Look at me, and how mean I can act’

The rest of the cast did well. Lear was let down a bit by the director’s hand at one stage. At the very start of his madness he gets angry, and tears a light fitting from the wall. This is obviously to symbolise the start of the horror to come, but it jars - it seems contrived.

Directors love to do spectacular things with sets. Sometimes they seem not to trust their actors or the words to do the work. The set here takes center stage - as the madness of the King increases, so the stage disintegrates - great panels crashing to the floor, walls splitting asunder, even the walls surrounding the audience cracking away to reveal the bare theatre ‘outside’.

The storm floods through the roof, soaking the furnishings and flooding the stage, as Lear rails against the elements.

During the interval I sat and watched as the techs reset and repaired the stage. I found it quite mesmerising, and it is perhaps telling that there seemed more mechs than actors.

The second half is the familiar end game that we know and love, and it was well acted and convincing. Since the histrionics of the stage were done with, the acting and the characters could take center stage, and on the whole the ensemble did a good job, but I felt a bit distanced from the characters, possibly because they had not had a chance to strike before the set stole their focus.

On the whole though, an enjoyable production, and one that reminded me of just how good a theatre writer Shakespeare was.

I have made it to London, and settled in at my aunt’s house in Croydon, south London, ready to start looking for jobs.
This is the scary bit - I haven’t done this for some time, so it’s gonna be quite scary.