Purcell’s King Arthur has long been a problematic work. It’s not quite an opera, not quite a play; the singing characters are bit parts, the story is one that only a devoted Arthurian scholar will recognise. Purcell’s music is incidental to a vast and largely forgettable text by Dryden. Most modern performances adapt both drama and words, but it takes a director as determined as Daisy Evans to offer a rewriting as bold as this: a reflection on national identity – King Arthur in the age of Brexit.
Some numbers slotted easily into Evans’s conception, not least the climactic aria Fairest Isle, captivatingly sung by soprano Louise Alder as she stood on a chair next to Richard Egarr’s harpsichord. All the action happened around the players of the Academy of Ancient Music, whom Egarr led through a buoyant, dynamic performance: nothing was lacking on the musical side. But anyone wanting a coherent narrative had no more luck than they would have had with Dryden’s original, or indeed with the whole sorry Brexit saga itself.
The beginning had the dozen-strong chorus and six soloists, in anonymous modern dress, arriving on stage through the auditorium and joining in the refrains of an excerpt from Ali Smith’s novel Autumn, describing the morning after the referendum. This group of anxious, drifting people grouped and regrouped in various settings as indicated by posters at the sides – a polling station, a pub – with coloured tags around their necks reflecting shifting allegiances. Ashley Riches sang the Cold Genius’s aria from the floor of a homeless shelter; the Sirens, Alder and Mhairi Lawson, were on the pull in a nightclub.
Most of the texts were delivered by the actor Ray Fearon – a charismatic focal point, although when he relied on his crib sheet he could resemble a cocky academic delivering a paper. Additional excerpts by Blake, Rose Macaulay, Shakespeare, Wisława Szymborska and others each offered food for thought. But once the music began, Dryden’s words rarely advanced these thoughts any further. At least Fairest Isle offered the uncomfortable topicality Evans was looking for. Is this still how you feel about your country, it seemed to ask, given that Cupid’s job of removing care and envy only gets harder, and Venus won’t get to choose her dwelling without five years’ previous residency? Elsewhere, though, the Brexit angle seemed something on which to hang Purcell’s music – no more and no less.
