Skating on thin ice at Garsington Opera

It’s June. The sun is out – sometimes. Champagne should be bubbling over as the sweating, overdressed British stalk the herbaceous borders of unlikely country houses in search of operatic strawberries. It isn’t. It’s banned. So, on Tuesday Garsington Opera at Wormsley, gave us The Skating Rink, by composer, David Sawer in an as-live reprise of the 2018 production on the excellent Operavision platform. The Skating Rink rates a raspberry.

Garsington is the Brigadoon of opera festivals. A 600-seater performing space pavilion appears once a year for six weeks, then fades into storage. Opera buffs don’t have to wait for 100 years for its return – only 46 weeks.

The opera company was the brainchild of Leonard Ingrams, owner of beautiful Oxfordshire Garsington Manor and brother of Richard Ingrams, founder of the satirical magazine, Private Eye. Clearly, the siblings shared a wicked sense of humour. Private Opera.

All went well – until the neighbours complained about the noise. In 1997, after an unsuccessful court action to gag Garsington, local residents mounted a civil disobedience campaign. In a sort of White Noise Matters protest, Haydn’s Le Pescatrice was pulled from its performing plinth in a cacophony of local motor mowers, revving diesel tractors, even a private plane buzzing the opera tent. Very Oxfordshire; “Ottoline, that sodding opera thing is starting up again. Get me the Cessna”.

Leonard Ingrams soldiered on, now resisting persistent assaults via the Human Rights Act, as the mighty mowers transmogrified into learned litigants. He died in 2005 and the Ingrams family carried on supporting the opera until requiring a move to the Getty family’s Wormsley Park.

Garsington Opera does a great job, mounting productions of the familiar, the forgotten and the frightful. Amongst notable British firsts have been Haydn’s Orlando paladino, Janáček’s Šárka, Martinu’s Mirandolina, Offenbach’s Fantasio, and Richard Strauss’ Die Liebe der Danae. In 2018 they embarked on their first world premier new commission. British composer, David Sawer composed The Skating Rink.

The opera is based on a short thriller by Latin American novelist Roberto Bolaño. Rupert Christian, the Telegraph’s opera critic, described the plot as being of elusive significance, a put down of such dismissive elegance that, having not thought of it myself, I am simply stealing it. What he really means is, why did anyone bother?

Sawer attempts to disguise the thinness of the plot by presenting it in a complex triple version – each of the main characters, Remo, rich owner of a camp site (Do camp site owners really get rich? ed.), Gasparo, his out of luck, out of work aspiring poet pal, and Enric, a jobsworth local authority housing official, each narrating their own version of events act by act. This is meant to add intellectual heft. The audience reflects on the significance of their different perspectives. Meaningful. It ends up as confusing as three Glasgow drunks trying to tell the polis how the pub fight started.

Chris Andrews, the original translator of Bolaño’s book, describes The Skating Rink as; metaphorically operatic in a number of ways – euphemism for, unsuitable for operatic interpretation; and librettist Rory Mullarkey’s writing as; Treating Bolaño’s novel with a strong combination of loyalty and freedom – euphemism for, nothing like the novel. Chris Andrews is too polite. He concludes; Bolaño himself was adept at treatments of this kind and had little time for the idea of a definitive version. What he means is that Sawer and Mullarkey’s version has hacked Bolaño’s plot mercilessly.

And, what is the plot? The action is set in a ghastly, nameless, Costa Brava steak-and-kidney-pie resort. Act I is Gaspar’s story. He is a young Mexican poet – no poetry offered in evidence – and a night-watchman at the poxy Stella Maris campsite. His Chilean businessman friend and boss, Remo Moran, orders him to evict two female vagrants, Caridad and Carmen, who have been squatting for free.

Gaspar fancies Caridad, but obeys Remo in order to keep his job. Remo invokes orders from on high, a riff throughout the work, everyone clearly incapable of taking responsibility for anything. The pair, especially Carmen, quixotically a former opera singer, first resist, but eventually leave.

Gaspar is obsessed with Caridad, a sixties hippy vacantly staring at another world. He looks for her, finds Carmen, whom he follows through a dreamlike fiesta, until he spots her arguing with a presumed lover – Rookie. Rookie is played as the sort of British holiday drunk Ryanair flush out of the back of planes over The Bay of Biscay. Gaspar spots Caridad in the crowd, and follows her to the Palacio Benvingut, a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of town.

Inside the mansion he discovers a secret ice rink, where a beautiful young figure skater, Nuria, is skating, watched by a creepy, older pudgy man, Enric, remember, the local housing supremo. Gaspar sees Caridad in the shadows, holding a knife.

Act II: Climb aboard Emmett (Doc) Brown’s iffy Back to the Future DeLorean and jump back in time, to follow events from Remo’s point of view.

Remo is tasked by voyeur Enric, the housing guy, with removing all vagrants from his campsite. He ignores the order and devotes his energy instead to Nuria, an Olympic hopeful skater, who has recently become his girlfriend. Enric and his boss, town mayor Pilar, both invoke orders from on high.

The initial passion of Remo and Nuria’s relationship has been marred by the thwarting of her skating career prospects: funding has been cut by the local socialist council. She has nowhere to train.

The couple take a romantic swim, but Enric looms on the beach. Remo sees that Enric is jealous of his relationship with Nuria, so thinks it best to dump the vagrants to dispel Enric’s anger. Out go Carmen and Caridad.

Nuria begins to spend less and less time with Remo. Unable to find her, he turns to drink. In a seafront bar one evening, he meets Carmen and Rookie – the British drunk. Carmen entertains the patrons with her singing, and hints she has information to blackmail Enric.

Gaspar arrives at Remo’s room and tells him he’s found Nuria, at the Palacio Benvingut. Remo rushes there, stumbles across the skating rink, and makes a gruesome discovery: the body of Carmen, stabbed to death on the ice. Whodunnit? Maybe it’s the person standing over the blood-soaked body with the knife? But, I know there’s another Act and a Coda. Can’t be.

Act III

A jump back to the beginning again. How does Enric see it?

With local elections looming, Pilar, a sort of Theresa May bossy mayor-woman, tasks Enric with ridding the area of vagrants.

Enric is, of course, obsessed with Nuria. After finding out about the loss of her funding, he has embezzled a large amount of public money and built her a secret ice rink in the Palacio Benvingut, as one does. He hopes that this grand gesture will make her fall in love with him.

He goes with her to the ice rink every afternoon and watches her train. Bizarrely, he dreams that he himself can figure skate. Clunky way of flagging he wants to occupy her space.

When Enric runs into Remo and Nuria together on the beach, his hopes of romance are dashed. Carmen and Caridad are evicted from the campsite. Poor sods, that makes three times. In a neat production touch, Carmen drops the same bag for the third time on the way out. I think that’s called attention to continuity.

Nuria falls over while training. She senses Enric’s jealousy and assures him her relationship with Remo is just about sex, one of the few brilliantly funny lines in the libretto.  Enric goes out onto the ice and attempts to dance for her, but is startled by a noise in the shadows. The game is afoot, Watson.

Carmen visits Enric in his office. She and Caridad have stumbled upon the secret ice rink while searching for a new place to stay and Carmen threatens to blackmail Enric in return for her silence. Enric gives Carmen a wad of cash and she goes, warning Enric she wants more.

At a pre-election disco – this is a truly surreal view of Spanish political life – Pilar welcomes the guests. Nuria accidentally reveals the existence of the ice rink to Pilar. Enric attempts to maintain his composure by dancing feverishly with Nuria but admits he has embezzled funds when Pilar confronts him. Remo arrives with the police, who arrest Enric for Carmen’s murder. Enric protests innocence, but is nicked nonetheless.

Coda

The fact that the Coda is not a coda at all, but an essential part of the plot is evidence, if any more is needed, of how rickety this operatic construction is. In this explanatory version Gaspar finds Caridad on the ice, clutching the bloody knife. Caridad swears she didn’t murder Carmen. The pair make plans to flee to Mexico. Just like that!

Nuria visits Enric in prison. He has been convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to two years. Nuria promises to wait for the pudgy jailbird. Just like that!

Remo meets Rookie on the beach. The identity of the murderer is revealed. It was the man who fell from the Ryanair plane all along. Just like that!

The really good news is that Pilar has lost the election. Whoopee!

I don’t get David Sawer. In an awkward pre-performance interview he confided that he wasn’t really interested in opera at all. Musical theatre is his thing. His selection of Canadian playwright, Rory Mullarkey, as librettist seemed to have been random. Mullarkey took all of three weeks to mug up Bolaño’s book and deliver the words.

The interview was punctuated by telling silences as Sawer could not answer questions about the opera and handed over to Mullarkey, who did his best. There were embarrassed sniggers. Garsington Opera have done their level best to dress The Skating Rink up as a ground-breaking operatic work, bringing film noir thriller to the medium. It seems they failed to let Sawer and Mullarkey in on that agenda.

Sawer’s music is ground-breaking. It is instantly and gratingly forgettable. It leaps around the stave in no particular pattern. Rhythmless, tuneless, percussive, it would outdo a five-year-old novice piano hammerer. Yet, Sawer is capable of writing meaningful orchestral pieces. His orchestral suite, Parthenope is a good example.

Garsington made a lot of the percussion fixation. There is a very watchable, behind-the-scenes interview with percussionist Cameron Sinclair – available here – in which he describes all the unusual instruments he is asked to use; bend a large bow to play cymbals and a vibraphone – to make a sustaining sound, apparently; whack a spring coil from a van; play complex chords on crotales – dense metal disks. Sinclair is fascinating, but all his crafted subtlety of tone was lost in the blast of Sawer’s chaotic score.

It seems only fair to leave the singers out of it, as their disjointed contribution to the melee was difficult to judge. Save to say, that tenor Sam Furness, who sang Gaspar, was given sufficient melodic line to allow a judgement that his is a fine talent in the making.

Garsington Opera can do better than this. Perhaps choosing more established composers for newly commissioned work is beyond their budget. Britain’s music colleges are surely brimming over with angry young talent, the likes of tomorrow’s Mark-Anthony Turnage and Thomas Ades. David Sawer has little interest in opera. Leave him in peace to do something else.