How gratuitous would everyone would have found this if the film had never existed?
This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Say what you like about the place, Covent Garden takes seriously its mission to confront us with the worst thing in the world: wealthy, bourgeois, ageing white racist perverts. And now they’ve put them on stage, too!
Those non-bourgeois lads Mark-Anthony Turnage (composer), Lee Hall (writer) and Richard Jones (director) teamed up to transfer the old Danish “My dad’s a child-rapist!” movie Festen (“Celebration”) to the stage — the most hotly anticipated new opera for a while — and how the lookalike audience roared.
For the past 30 years, a favourite stage design has been a mirror-image of the auditorium, the audience confronted by their degenerate selves — notably in Germany, a milksop modern equivalent of Baader-Meinhoff’s pungently-expressed quibbles with the state’s habit of rehabilitating all those old Nazis.
Citizens dutifully troop to their local opera house (the country is blighted by 80 of these state-funded hellholes) to be shat on, and they rather like it — the modern equivalent of sitting through lengthy penitential Lutheran cantatas in freezing medieval churches. Miriam Buether’s design has more naturalistic fish to fry here, with the action set in a hotel owned by the Klingefeldt family, where they and friends convene for patriarch Helge’s sixtieth birthday. But we get the point.
The questions with any serious adaptation are — what is it for, how does it transfigure the original, through music, into something else? The blueprint is Mozart’s Figaro, turning its little French sex-comedy into some kind of cosmic manifesto, but newer examples like Britten’s Turn of the Screw and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk show it can still work with “modernist” musical idioms.
Opera always was a sensual art form: it can’t really examine or analyse, but it can immerse itself, wallow in the emotions and implications of the surface action. That’s why The Turn of the Screw is a genuinely disturbing experience: beauty seduces us into complicity.
Music becomes an actor — or a director — adding depth and creating manifold sympathies far from Henry James’ chilly text. Shostakovich does the same in Lady Macbeth, turning Leskov’s pulpy thriller into a roaring black comedy that plunges bloodily into the sex and violence whilst making the dreadful heroine a tragic figure.
Festen certainly looks and sounds like opera. Whilst the film (a product of the austere Dogme 95 movement) was famously made with hand-held cameras, no artificial lighting, no music and all that anti-jazz, Turnage translates it into the most slatternly of all art forms, whose all-embracing artificiality is its lifeblood.
Seventy five people on stage, 25 named roles, another 75 doing their thing down in the pit, a massive set, props until kingdom come — plus (this being Richard Jones) a load of wallpaper. But is it any more than Thomas Vinterberg’s film-script, redone with a fancy backing track and swimming in money? This collision of means and media and sensibility should produce a jolt of some sort, shouldn’t it?
Turnage and Hall go about the job assiduously, doing the approved opera thing by separating the scenes with orchestral interludes, useful tools for building an atmosphere and a moral ethos.
The action and script follow the film closely, zooming along pretty much in real time — it’s over in 100 minutes — the voices foregrounded against an orchestra clickety-clacking along like a train: it’s all delivered with brilliant clarity, and you hardly need to glance at the surtitles.
Every so often things calm down for an aria of one sort or another, e.g. that central speech of Christian’s when he tells everyone about what daddy did at bathtime, soundtracked first with rather lyrical oboes and bassoons, then strings, over a steady beat in the bass, then becoming (in the approved manner) neurotic, intense, anguished — followed by a 15-second silence after the bomb is dropped … in short, it is exactly what you expect.
Which really goes for the whole thing — much to everyone’s relief: expertly fashioned, beautifully delivered by an eye-wateringly high-tab cast, with a great variety (within obvious idioms) of music, jazzy, driven, wormy, decorously freaked out, all the components of the orchestra used in exactly the right way. They are brought to life with expressionist starkness by conductor Ed Gardner — even the odd bit of black comedy on stage, though the attempted funny bits rarely come off.
All the characters get their go — even the dead sister, who pops up through the sofa — yes, daddy’s sofa — with a regular sadface tune and weirdly rehashes the words of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well … ” — a ghastly bathos, in fact, the dead popping back to deliver posh, and highly inaccurate, Hallmark messages.
Is this really good enough? Clearly, in a sense, yes: the overnight reviews went crazy, the thing pretty much sold out, everyone was happy. Huge relief, in fact, after the egg Turnage laid last time (Coraline) — following which he huffily, if temporarily, resigned from opera.
I can’t help wondering exactly how gratuitous everyone would have found this if the film had never existed and it was an original piece. Still, either way, taken all in all, and on the plus side, the main thing to celebrate here is surely this: that Benjamin Britten no longer has a monopoly on paedo opera.
