Streetwise Opera's latest production is an ambitious staging of Mahler's song cycle, the Rückert Lieder, set in the municipal opulence of Nottingham's Council House. Streetwise is an opera company like no other: working with the homeless and ex-homeless community, they have created a show that blurs the boundaries between professional singers, musicians and the participants on the project. The result, in Erica Whyman's production, is a theatrical hybrid - part song cycle, part opera in the round - that explores the contemporary resonances of Mahler's songs.
Soutra Gilmour's designs turn the council chamber into a dark, creepy cabaret, complete with softly lit tables and glasses filled with blue liquid. From the start, the performers, dressed as gangsters and molls, surround the audience, whispering lines from Robert Thicknesse's translations of Rückert's originals. Dominic Harlan's world-weary pianist plays snatches of Mahler's songs and warped waltzes, joined by a succession of performers who recite and sing. Each number is dramatised by the company, so that Don't Pry Into My Songs becomes the story of Chris Freeman's frustrated composer, and When Midnight Came is an existential lament focused on Katie Lee's intense rendition of the poem. After each dramatisation, conductor Nicholas Kok takes over to conduct Sinfonia Viva in chamber arrangements of Mahler's songs.
It could have become a predictable formula, with sections of speech performed by the participants followed by the original lieder. But as the show goes on, the performers grow in confidence, and the individual dramas have a mysterious power. At the heart of the staging is Liebst Du um Schönheit ("Loving but Beauty"), in which Anthony Faulkner entreats Cassandra Harold with his pleas of love; when soprano Anna Dennis takes up Mahler's song, the music carries an extra dramatic power. It's the same at the end of the show, when the company sings an arrangement of When Midnight Came, an expression of communal grief that clinches the evening. This is not just a worthy attempt to make music theatre with an under-represented section of the community, but a vivid reimagining of Mahler's songs.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 08705 321 321. Then touring.
