Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
In March 2020 the covid-19 epidemic
forced the closure of all British theatres. Some companies adapted
by putting archive recordings of past productions online, others
by streaming new shows. And we take the opportunity to explore
other vintage productions preserved online. Until things return to
normal we review the experience of watching live theatre onscreen.
The
Seven Deadly Sins
Opera
North Spring 2022
This
song
cycle with dance, created in 1932 by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill,
shows both writer and composer at their inventive and wickedly satiric
best, and this production by Opera North is thoroughly enjoyable.
Brecht's
libretto imagines two sisters from Louisiana who travel America for
seven years to send money home to their family and also save up enough
to build a house they can retire to.
That
sentence
requires some unpacking. The sisters are both named Anna – one generally
sings and the other mainly dances – and the text suggests openly that
they might be aspects of the same person.
And
like
the London of The Threepenny Opera and the Chicago of Arturo Ui,
Louisiana and the various cities the sisters visit are totally imaginary
places. In only one case – in Los Angeles Anna gets a job in the movies
– is there any real point to the place names.
What
is pointed is that in every city the dancing Anna is accused of one of
the Seven Deadly Sins while the singing Anna draws a cautionary moral
lesson from her sister's lapse.
It
may take you a couple of episodes to spot what Brecht is really up to –
and since you are meant to spot it I won't apologise for a spoiler. In
each case what is damned as sin is actually normal or even admirable
human behaviour.
Pride
involves
dancing Anna getting a job in a cabaret and trying to dance beautifully
when all the punters want is a stripper. Gluttony is her joining a
ballet company and having trouble meeting the anorexic weight limits
demanded of her. Lust is falling in love with a poor boy instead of
reserving her favours for a rich sugar daddy, and so on.
The
real targets of the show's anger are the societal hypocrisy and
(surprise!) capitalism that make the judgements.
In
the last case – Envy – even singing Anna admits to yearning for a world
in which ordinary human virtues could exist, but up to that point it is
she who has to deliver the moral, in aphorisms that sound straight out
of The Threepenny Opera: 'You must tolerate abuses or you won't be
tolerated,' or 'Pride is fine if you don't need the money.'
Brecht
is
almost pixieish in his sly wit, the English language text by Michael
Feingold is pithily to-the-point, and Weill's music is equally
subversive – note how in the final scene the sung words declare a happy
ending while the music denies it with every note.
In
this
Opera North production Wallis Giunta sings Anna's warnings and
condemnations of her sister with a straight face while still conveying
Brecht's double meanings, and Shelley Eva Haden acts as well as dances
James Holmes's simultaneously jagged and beautiful choreography.
At forty minutes the piece says what it has to say with terse precision, but the thoughts and emotions it generates will linger on.
Gerald Berkowitz
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