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Opera Review

The King's Head Theatre is the perfect venue for Anna Gregory's version of Pagliacci, the latest OPERAUPCLOSE production to strip opera back to its bare essentials so it can fit in the back of a pub. This fits the theme of Pagliacci, perhaps the longest running opera ever, as it concerns the fate of a travelling troupe of players or Pagliacci, who pitch up in The King's Head as players have done since ancient times, with a show to make the audience laugh, cry and lose themselves in the spectacle of passion and betrayal on stage, emerging from the cathartic experience with a new balance restored to their own lives, just as Aristotle prescribed in his famous Poetics.

Leoncavallo claimed his opera was inspired by a true case of murder onstage, presided over in court by his father, who was a judge. Pagliaccio (Paul Featherstone) is the clown, puppeteer, ringmaster and jealous husband of his pregnant young wife Nedda (Katie Bird). Other members of the troupe Tonio (Dominic Barrand) and Beppe (John Gyeantey) also love Nedda. Tonio lusts after her while the sweet, funny and devoted Beppe adores her and tries to protect her. Nedda has a lover, Silvio (David Durham) who plans to take her away at midnight, but they are spied upon by the spurned and vicious Tonio. He fetches Pagliaccio to see the lovers and stokes him towards a terrible act of revenge, which must happen during the troupe's play, because it's time for the show and the show must go on.

The genius of this production was to place Silvio at the back of the house as a member of the audience, his mounting anxiety for Nedda an insistent tension throughout, and to have two other singers, Adam Kowalczyk and Emma Smith, as a husband and wife seated among us so that their comic interjections brought the audience into the performance, blurring the boundary between art and life.  The 'play within a play' theme was expanded even further during the interval, when a youthful ballet couple wreathed through the crowd in the public bar with a beautiful dance, expressing an idealised romantic love in ironic contrast to the dark, grotesque obsessions of Pagliaccio.

Three particular highlights of the opera were performed so well, the audience were transported to another plane emotionally, so that they could easily have been at the Royal Opera House instead of a North London pub. The first was the prologue, sung in a rich baritone by the muscular, string-vested and tattooed Dominic Barrand as Tonio, reminding the audience that actors have hearts which can be broken too. The second was the enchanting songbird aria sung by Katie Bird, dreaming of escape from the troupe for her and her unborn child. Inevitably, the audience waited for Pagliaccio's famous aria 'Vesti la giubba', also known as 'Put on the motley', where he has to disguise his broken heart under a clown's make-up. Paul Featherstone really came into his own as an actor, as well as a singer at this moment and in the second half, when the tragic denouement depends entirely on his portrayal of the tortured and emotionally conflicted clown figure.

Congratulations also to Musical Director Kelvin Lim who conducted cello, clarinet and singers, holding the integrity of the music together and providing the arch and swoop of musical intensity demanded by the rollercoaster ride of emotion which is this timeless opera of human passion, so powerful that the stage cannot contain it.