Workshop Premiere: The Earl of Kildare

Contemporary woodcut of Silken Thomas laying siege to Dublin Castle in 1534

Workshop production of The Earl of Kildare

Composed by Fergus Johnston, with libretto by Celia de Fréine

Presented by Opera Ireland/Living Opera in Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co. Wicklow, on 6 February 2009

Cast: Nyle Wolfe (Thomas Fitzgerald); Joan O’Malley (Frances Fitzgerald); John Owen Miley-Read (Leonard Gray); Eugene Ginty (Christopher Paris/De Nealan); Deboragh Abbott (Janet Eustace); Jeffrey Ledwidge (Conor O’Brien); Martin Briody (Archbishop Alen/Fr Travers); Ross Scanlon (Lord Lieutenant/Master of the Rolls/Skeffington); Simon Morgan (Montague/James Delahide); Seán Bean (Gerald Fitzgerald)

Conducted by Fergus Sheil, with pianist Miles Lallemant.  Directed by John McKeown.

Fergus Johnston’s opera about Silken Thomas (Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare) was given what you might call a preliminary outing at the Mermaid last night, with a staged realisation of what was openly couched as a ‘first draft’.  So, the books were down and the singers were moving about the stage, with some basic costuming, but some text was unset (which explained some awkward shifts in action) and the accompanying ensemble consisted of Miles Lallemant at the piano – doing a great job – occasionally supplemented in some of the scene changes with a computer simulation of the full score.  Being a young cast the performances were inevitably mixed and a bit sketchy at times, though some performances stood out – Nyle Wolfe as Fitzgerald especially – and most of the singers acquitted themselves perfectly well, considering that they’d had to learn some hard music within a very narrow timeframe.

In the (brief) post-show discussion, director John McKeown reflected on experiences he’d had working on new works (notably Sally Beamish’s Monster for Scottish Opera) where the ‘first’ performance had led those involved to wish that there’d been more of a phased process of development, and so this had been the idea here.  On those terms, this workshop was a success and it was a great performance overall, though the discussion afterwards was unfortunately truncated, which left one wondering what the point of a ‘public workshop’ had been, as only three questions from the audience were actually taken.  There are broader issues worth exploring that a longer discussion might have been able to open up.  As it was, we were able to at least broach the stuctural limitation of the piece, in that its reliance on following historical narrative makes it highly episodic, with a lot of scene changes, some of which had music, some in stark silence (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing).  The brief discussion on this that followed only touched on the musical implications of this, whereas to me the episodic nature of the piece is quite possibly the main problem in itself.

Personally, I’d rather they expand some of the scenes, maybe let others go altogether, find some way of injecting a counter-narrative device, and to explore the story rather than simply tell it.  It would be nice to see some symbolic thread running through, apart from the inevitable onrush of history.  As it stands, the theatrical orientation of the opera – the dramaturgy – is too obviously cinematic and needs to be disturbed, so as to push the expressive potential that only occasionally comes through. The strongest scene, musically and theatrically, occurred near the middle, when Fitzgerald hears of his father’s death in the Tower of London, and the exercise of grief allowed for a broader sense of how this could work as an opera, with Fitzgerald’s solo lament and the ensemble that followed.  On the other hand, the scene where Fr Travers persuades Fitzgerald and O’Brien to appeal for the support of the Papacy is almost comically perfunctory in its present state.

As theatre, this Earl was largely conventional and naturalistic, and I would have loved to heave heard what Fergus Johnston’s theatrical vision for this piece actually was, and whether he had thought about the possibilities of non-vocal music theatre, such as dance or mime.  Also, given the inevitable lack of any stage design, it would have been interesting to know if anyone had any visual concept for the piece, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.  With Celia de Fréine’s clear libretto, Johnston was at least freed from the nightmare of setting banal or dead prose, which so often dogs modern opera.

If anyone is interested in hearing some of Fergus Johnston’s music for ths opera played instrumentally, a suite (‘Scenes and Interludes from The Earl of Kildare‘) will be played by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James MacMillan, at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on February 27, and transmitted live (and online) by RTÉ Lyric fm.