Festen, the opera
How does the same harrowing drama succeed in several different genres? The Scandi-noir drama “Festen”, which began life as Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish film in 1998, went on to become David Eldridge’s English-language play in 2004 (an Almeida production that transferred to the West End). On Tuesday 11 at Covent Garden, it made its first appearance as an opera, composed by Mark-Anthony Turnage to a libretto by Lee Hall and directed by Richard Jones. Like the (very different) film, like the (very different) play, the opera makes a sensational impact.
In each of these genres, the narrative core of “Festen” has stayed much the same. The successful patriarch Helge is entertaining family and many friends to dinner on his sixtieth birthday when his eldest son Christian, called upon to propose his father’s health, startles them all by revealing that Helge used to abuse, sexually and serially, his two eldest children.
How different the style of each “Festen” has been! When you watch the film, the drama is shaped by the brilliantly informal and highly intimate camerawork – closeups and tracking shots abound. What could be less operatic?
Yet, just as the film is about the nature of filming, so this entirely gripping opera is about what opera alone can do. It has ensembles in which three or more different kinds of dialogue are paced simultaneously but in different speeds and idioms. It has large-scale ensembles in which the sheer scale of opera makes an immense impression. (In one huge conga number - all-singing, all-dancing – every character is individualised within a breathtakingly multi-directional and rhythmically intricate pattern: a knockout achievement, brilliantly choreographed by Lucy Burge.)
“Festen” has solos in which opera’s capacity to dramatise the soliloquy is riveting. And it gives each character his or her own inner musical voice. Its range of dynamics is large, but at no point do the singers go in for cliché-style operatic delivery: no churning vibrato, no distorted vowels. One of Turnage’s special achievements is that, when character sing various of the obscenities and foul locutions of Hall’s words, they don’t sound unnatural in song. Yet the vocal lines are often suspenseful: in terms of melody, harmony, and rhythm, the characters keep us guessing where they’ll go next.
As always, Richard Jones seems determined to prevent audiences from exclaiming “Wasn’t that lovely?” about his productions. The designs are more garish than glamorous, amusingly so. Nicky Gillibrand has costumed the characters in vivid couture of thoroughly peccable taste; Miriam Buether has designed a hotel whose interiors are aggressively vulgar. And Jones directs most of the supporting characters to show various degrees of thoroughly British caricature, so that human absurdity is all on the surface.
Edward Gardiner conducts this elaborate composition commandingly. Covent Garden has cast the opera from strength. Allan Clayton’s bright tenor, immaculate diction, and expressively inelegant body language maximise Christian’s bravery and vulnerability. As his father, Gerald Finley’s firm power of sound and presence show both Helge’s authority and his seeming respectability. Natalya Romaniw brings the sorrows of Helena affectingly to life with the lights and clouds within her polychromatic voice. Stéphane Degout (Michael), Rosie Aldridge (Mother), John Tomlinson (Grandpa), Susan Bickley (Grandma) are particular standouts amid an illustriously characterful cast.
A particular fascination in each version of “Festen” is that its first revelations of past sexual abuse don’t immediately change the situation onstage. The listeners try not to react. They prefer to deny. And this is symptomatic of a larger social conservatism: these people would rather celebrate their old chum Helge than they would demonstrate compassion to those who have suffered rape or trauma.
And, relatively late in the story, the situation suddenly turns racist. When Christian’s sister Helena (Natalya Romaniw) brings a boyfriend of colour to the party, her often inane brother Michael (Stéphane Degout) leads a racially confrontational account of “Baa, baa, black sheep” that suddenly, appallingly, demonstrate how instinctive is this whole community’s racism runs. These people are reluctant to acknowledge child abuse, but quick to express hostility to racial outsiders.
Here the inevitable comparison is with Benjamin Britten’s dazzling use of the shanty “Old Joe has gone fishing” in “Peter Grimes”. Turnage can’t deliver his “Black Sheep” song with the astonishing naturalness of Britten’s. Even so, his far more disagreeable group song is effective enough in this chilling situation.
Turnage’s orchestration, heightening dramatic tension, often emphasises wind instruments and percussion. The opera is played in a single act (with several scene changes) of a hundred minutes. The music keeps changing its grip on us. I suspect that some passages may prove weaker on successive listenings, but this is that rare thing: a modern opera of which I’d soon like several successive listenings.
In both film and play, the libretto reaches a quietly narrative climax at the end of the long dinner when Helena reads the letter from her dead sister Linda that she is taking her own life because her father’s rapses have ruined it. This at last is accepted by all present as incontrovertible proof of Helge’s abuse. But, to chilling effect, Hall changes the final morning-after breakfast scene. Whereas in the film Helge accepts, as gracefully as he can, that nobody present will want to know him again, the opera shows ordinary life resuming for him, Christian, and everyone else. In a hotel-foyer scene, the many supporting characters greet Christian pleasantly, if briefly – only then to greet Helge much the same way. And so they brush under the carpet the horrors that surfaced the night before. Poor Christian is left dazed, alone. To what end was all his bravery?