I Have Had Enough [NSW]

Disappointing, is what it was.  Clearly much talent had been shoved into one end of Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of I Have Had Enough, but what came out the other side was a concept that failed to satisfy.  That is to say, while I quite enjoy a glass of wine or two, and also have a fondness for chocolate, even though the idea of inserting a chardonnay and Mars_^® bar into a blender might sound like something rather feasible – combining two of the things I love – the outcome would be far from delicious.  It is certainly true that director Kip Williams achieved what he had set out to do – there was a clarity and simplicity of aesthetic that suggested a focused mind – but one questions the validity of the goals he has set for himself.

I Have Had Enough is not an opera like one would see in an Opera Australia production, and as such one does not wish to judge it by the same criteria.  Whereas OA’s most recent production of Love of the Nightingale is an intersection between drama and music, as indeed most operas are, I Have Had Enough felt more like a drama set to music.  Which is not a terrible idea: composers have been working off librettos for many a century, why not reverse the process?  Indeed, after having watched Williams’ attempt, I am interested to see more work in the same vein.  But whatever the process was for this particular opera (the Director’s Note describes only a basic narrative being known before the rehearsal process, the rest being developed in the five-week period leading up to the opening night), the effect was one of profound disconnection.

^{L-R Alexandra Aldrich, Mitchell Riley, Michele Durman. Photo: Kathy Luu}

The music was in two halves.  The first, a Bach cantata, “Ich Habe Genug” BMV 82, and the second, Jack Symonds’ Nunc dimittis, composed as a response to Bach’s piece.  The text of the first was sung by Anna Dowsley, gliding around the stage with a sword in her hand, pale makeup on her face, and a black dress on her body.  Symonds’ response was articulated by Mitchell Riley, dressed much the same, though taking a more quirky and highly expressionistic approach to his half.  Both singers acquitted themselves well, with Riley deserving special mention.

While the music had words, the drama, on the other hand, had none.  Four actors – Gabriel Fancourt, Alexandra Aldrich, Michele Durman, and Amanda McGregor – played out a sort of surreal fable.  The three girls entered, leashed by a chain around their necks to a man with a sizeable paunch.  They then proceeded to pick four oversized cherries from a tree, choosing one to place on a mudcake large enough to make any diabetics in the audience faint.  They feed the man, they are raped by him, then they find a sword, free themselves, and kill the man (this involves disemboweling, his intestines pulled across the stage by the three women, referring back to their chains).  After this they gorge themselves on the food they were denied, then turn on each other, all the while developing paunches of their own (which, as one found out later, was not excess fat from the overeating, but rather fully developed embryos from  their earlier impregnation).  A child is born (or perhaps aborted) to one of the women.  And so ends the opera.

Visually striking, with the man reminding one of Edward Gant in Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness (on earlier in the year at the Sydney Theatre Company), the story was nevertheless a flimsy one, which suffered from being stretched out to the fifty-five minute duration of the opera, a more than short length to begin with.  The main theme of the story seemed to be that “life sucks, and even when you think you have it made, life will find a way of making it suck again”.  Waiting for Godot provides a happy contrast with the despair of I Have Had Enough.  But it wasn’t so much despair that one felt, rather it was disinterest.  As theatre, one found it to be severely lacking.

The music saved the day, however, with the Bach played well, and the Symonds fresh not just in approach but in temperament as well – Symonds charting out a creepy and disintegrating territory that had some moments of impact, even when the drama did not.  Six musicians were lead by conductor Huw Belling, with viola soloist James Wannan providing one of the musical highlights of the short evening.

One does not regret seeing I Have Had Enough, nor does one find that their time was wasted, but whether one’s life was in any way enriched by the proceedings is another question.  I am eager to observe the Sydney Chamber Opera’s next operatic outing, but find myself in the unfortunate position of not being able to commend their most recent foray.  The effort is to be applauded, but the result is not.