The proceedings were opened by Despina, alone on the stage of the Grand Theatre in Leeds.
In a set rigged out as a police station, she addressed a mass of young children gathered in the stalls on a Saturday afternoon with their adults, telling them that her name was Despina, and that she was in her place of work. To prove it, she clicked away at a manual typewriter. Speaking in a Geordie accent, she soon had her audience in hand, inviting them to call out in pantomime style and explaining that they had to help in a hunt for a thief, though it was not clear at first what had been stolen. Was it a royal crown, or a tray of jam tarts, a tent or the light from a lighthouse?
As part of their detective work, the children had been provided with pencils and little booklets with illustrations and boxes to fill in to find missing words like PIRATES and CINDERELLA. This had to be done while the show was running, but that was no problem because the house lights were on.
Despina was soon singing a snatch from her opera, Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, in which she is a maid, and just the right sort as it turned out, because her character is brilliant in the arts of impersonation and disguise, which are crucial in this little operetta as well. Soon, the first of a series of characters from ten operas was making an entrance, usually from stage left, behind which the quick costume change area was positioned.
The Chief of Police entered first, portrayed with a cod stateside accent and an authoritative bass voice. His extract from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance was ‘A Policeman’s Lot is Not a Happy One’ in a shortened version. The audience joined in with this, and it was repeated later during the fifty minutes of the show. “How low can you get?” the Chief asked us, singing down to his boots.
We tried hard to sing down into ours as we joined in. The circus ringmaster who appears in a comic cameo role in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride was next, followed by another comic character, the exuberant Preziosilla the fortune teller from Verdi’s La forza del destino. As with all the characters, there was no problem with the words of aria fragments because they all appeared on the screens at both sides of the proscenium arch, in English, at least if your reading skills were reasonably good.
The Queen of Hearts from Will Todd’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was in cross-dressing mode and had an agile tenor voice. The audience was asked to shout their preference for either her or the character following her, Elizabeth the First from Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda. Ethel Smyth was a prominent composer and suffragette in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who wrote ‘The March of the Women’. She has been neglected, like most female composers, so it was heartening to see her opera The Wreckers mentioned. We need a full production now. The lighthouse keeper from it was followed by a rather dour badger from Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, who ended the parade of characters by singing alongside a flamboyant Cavaradossi from Puccini’s Tosca. Now how often are you going to see that happen?
The search for the thief (I will not write a spoiler) did not entirely convince the audience, particularly the younger ones, but it served its purpose well.
The Big Opera Mystery is an Opera North commission created and directed by the multi-talented Jonathan Ainscough, who has often been involved in participatory operatic projects which involve non-professional and community performers, especially young people.
For this production, professionals were used, soprano Julia Mariko, mezzo Lauren Young, tenor Trystan Llŷr Griffiths and bass Frazer Scott, all of them enthusiastically joining in the thick and fast fun. The conductor was Jack Ridley and the costumes were designed by Bek Palme, who also made sure that her minimal set could be quickly and easily removed to make way for evening performances of La Bohème.
The whole thing was very well received by the audience across the age range, judging from the constant buzz of interest and excitement, certainly by my five-year-old grandson. It was a reminder that Opera North initiates first-class outreach projects targeting young people, which is increasingly welcome when music and drama are often downgraded in schools.
Photography by Tom Arber.
Main image Trystan Llŷr Griffiths, Lauren Young, Frazer Scott and Julia Mariko.
