Touring Wednesday 12 November Skipton Town Hall; Saturday 15 November The Warehouse, Holbeck, Leeds and Sunday 16 November Marsden Mechanics, Huddersfield.
Ben Crick’s new chamber opera draws parallels between the Luddite resistance to mechanisation in
the textile industry in the early nineteenth century and our own attitude to the evident encroachment of AI into our daily working lives. Will it take away our jobs and livelihoods? Or will it present mankind with a host of new opportunities?
Emma Williams‘ set in the intimate 100-seater Studio 1 at Mind The Gap looks ridiculously simple even for minimalist theatre, consisting as it does of a table with mirrored panels as a backdrop. However, whilst Neil Balfour‘s 2030 AI humanoid Adam (pronoun: he/it) and Daisy Mitchell‘s Eva, the laboratory inventor, grapple with the consequences of his creation, their holograms, as condemned Luddite George Mellor and his pregnant wife, Mary, appear upstage, beyond the mirrors, an insight to the York prison of 1813. With synchronised, pre-recorded sound, these too have a moral dilemma to confront. It is a neat trick, not only allowing vocal duets within each couple, but also quartets between them.
Both relationships are soon in turmoil. Sentient Adam shakes off his robotic genesis and starts to question whether he will enrich lives or destroy them. Mary asks of George whether the acts of sabotage and the murder of a mill owner have had a lasting impact in promoting workers’ rights. Will either effect change for the better?
With each having an adversarial and a defending role to portray, both singers are splendid in their parts, with clear diction and sure intonation in what, at times, are angular, rhythmically difficult vocal lines.
Happily, Ben Crick eschews mobilising electronic instruments – who knows what sound world we may be offered by 2030 – but he certainly makes full use of his quintet, other-worldly hand-stopping from Matt Crossley‘s french horn, top-string harmonics and low-string double-stopping – a touch of “The Soldier’s Tale”, perhaps – from Christopher Jones‘ violin and Tom Collingwood‘s cello and some beautiful, expressive playing from Anna Powell on oboe. She has the evening’s leitmotiv, a tangential variant on “Scarborough Fair”, that, ultimately, keeps us all earthbound.
On percussion, Polly McMillan deftly demonstrates her left-hand timpani, right-hand anvil technique.
Kamal Kaan‘s libretto is eloquent, if not a little wordy for musical setting, but his text brings the
similarities of the historical moments convincingly into focus for our consideration. Mark Twain
wrote that history does not repeat itself, but it surely rhymes at times. What will the next few years
bring humankind?
We raise our children to become independent of us. Neo-Darwinist thinking suggests that AI is the next-stage evolutionary leap. Devoid of problems of feeding, breathing and waste disposal, it is its models that, ultimately, will explore the universe in our stead. By then, we will be merely the long-surpassed biological phase in evolution’s course.
Will he/it still have an overbearing need to write music?
Photography by Anthony Robling.
