REVIEW: Garine, Arcola Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Gariné

Arcola Studio 1

14/08/15

4 Stars

The annual Grimeborn Opera Festival aims not only to provide a showcase for contemporary opera and new versions of established repertory, but also to highlight works once popular and now forgotten. Gariné is one such work, and a rare bird on any number of counts. It’s a long five-act operetta from the 1870s and thus contemporary with Carmen (to which witty allusion is made at one point in the evening); but there the surface similarities end. The composer was an Armenian, Dikran Tchouhadjian, son of the sultan’s clockmaker, and a part therefore of the cosmopolitan world of mid-nineteenth-century Istanbul, protected from the increasing persecution of his compatriots. He received an excellent musical education in Milan before writing a series of successful operettas and less successful historical operas that garnered him the nicknames of the ‘Oriental Offenbach’ and ‘Armenian Verdi’. His greatest success was with Gariné then under its original but more prosaic title of The Chickpea Vendor, which was much performed around Europe for several decades.

What we heard at the Arcola was in important respects different from the original. This was a semi-staged performance and therefore a great deal of the original material was cut. Instead of an orchestra we had a grand piano played with admirable delicacy and panache by Kelvin Thomson. So it is impossible to comment directly on the composer’s great attributed skills as an orchestrator. A new libretto and translation was provided by Gerald Papasian, the director and driving force behind the whole enterprise. He also interpolated narrative summaries to provide continuity through the much-amended plot.

Musically this work has a great deal of charm though if I had heard it blind I would have suspected the influence of Rossini and Gilbert and Sullivan rather than Offenbach and Verdi! Long sequences of choruses in waltz or quadrille tempo are broken up by arias that showcase the voices of the principals in music that is testing but not virtuosic for its own sake. The melodies have a sweetness and folk inflection to them that indicates an Armenian source, but the accompaniments generate a bouncy, arpeggiated vigour with occasional harmonic walks on the wilder side that suggest how attractive and sophisticated an orchestral backcloth to this music would sound. Otherwise it does not come over as a specifically orientalist work, at least in its aural properties: more a highly competent operetta in the mainstream European house style of the day. Perhaps I am simply registering my own cultural conditioning but at times The Pirates of Penzance did not seem far away (and that is certainly not a bad thing).

Dramatically, the story is no better and no worse than many an implausible set of romantic mishaps from the world of operetta. The plot revolves around a theatre company whose director, Armen, (Edward Saklatvala) has just lost his lead singer to a rival company. Gariné (Danae Eleni) is ideally suited to save the day, but unfortunately her father Hor Hor, the wealthy chickpea vendor (Leon Berger), is opposed to her taking the stage. There are many obstacles to be overcome before both the play and the relationship can go forward, not least in a whole complicated series of sub-plots that it would be tedious to summarise, except to say that they provide plenty of set-piece opportunities for sensual choreography, quick costume-changes, comic pratfalls, melodramatic threats, and commentary by the chorus of actors and dancers that provide the heart to the work.

In two respects, however, this is a distinctive and individual scenario. The question of whether women should perform on the stage or not was a real controversy in the theatre of the composer’s day which had real consequences for those at the centre of it. There is an edge to the musical writing and to the text here that rightly lifts the action out of knockabout comedy. And in addition there is an interesting debate taking place about the pecking order of theatre – does value lie with high art or with street theatre that is close to popular taste, or with both? At the end of the action the street comedians and jugglers demand equal consideration and ranking in the Istanbul theatre, alongside the formal troupes. Again this issue was one that mattered to the players and audiences of the day, and it has eerie pre-echoes of the debate that takes place in the Prologue to Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Music and theatre may be ‘holy arts’, but aren’t we all entitled to some time out?

With so much crammed into what was still a long evening, inevitably there were compromises and not all of them to the advantage of the piece. Papasian’s narrative interventions, while necessary for clarity’s sake, were over-long and garlanded with too much stage business that held up the action. Quite a bit of the basic acting, aside from the bravura concerted items, was wooden and under-rehearsed; and there were longueurs in the second half as the plot speeded ahead to its conclusion while the list of musical numbers still had a long time to run. That said, there were many unimpeachable strengths in the company and in the production that need to be noted. Vocally it was very accomplished across the range of principals and chorus, and all the chorus and ballet numbers, together with the many moments of elaborate comic business, were neatly choreographed and sometimes genuinely funny. It was great to see everyone display such joy and confidence in this rare material.

For me four performances stood out. Eleni’s rendition of the title role was very sympathetic and technically much more secure than her performance as Musetta last week, with delicate runs, a very good secure top register and only a hint of pressure on sustained high notes. She also acted well, moving plausibly from gaucheness to confidence across the evening. As her partner, Saklatvala sang with excellent clarity of sound and verbal definition, but was underpowered in his acting; whereas Leon Berger had a great time playing the outraged and outrageous patronizing patriarch, Hor Hor. In some ways, even in this new version, Hor Hor is the central and most interesting role, combining something of Rigoletto, Osmin and Falstaff in his persona, and Berger got all these elements across in musical detail and character acting. A special mention would go to Katie Grosset in the junior lead soprano role of Shoushan: she delivered her main aria in the second half with real panache and danced with understated grace throughout the evening.

The evening was notable for reviving a work of genuine tuneful elegance and comic potential. The commitment and skill of the production overall makes you want to see the same company offer a fully staged run in a larger venue - and soon.

Photos: Robert Workman Find out more about Grimeborn at the Arcola Theatre