Phillip Addis and Teiya Kasahara 笠原 貞野 in Silence, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Silence. Now there’s a puckish name for an opera.
With Silence, NUOVA Vocal Arts has taken in hand an expansive, richly imagined 1999 play by the English playwright/screenwriter Moira Buffini. This new addition to the opera repertoire, adapted from a fascinating play, has a challenging score by Vancouver composer Leslie Uyeda and a debut libretto by playwright Darrin Hagen (undoubtedly his first chance to have his words in surtitles over a stage).
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The quasi-historical 1999 play, produced here many a season ago by Northern Light Theatre’s Trevor Schmidt, is captivatingly odd, and intricate, as Hagen’s libretto embraces. The setting is medieval: violent first-century England, Saxon rulers plagued by Viking incursions. But the resonances — questions of power, sexuality and sexual trauma, gender identity — are very contemporary.
It starts as a kind of historical sitcom, a peeved Norman princess Ymma (Lara Ciekiewicz) getting dragged to England (“what a dump!”) on orders from her bro, to be married for political reasons. And the comedy continues when she discovers that the groom-to-be is a 14-year-old boy, Lord Silence of Cumbria (Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野). Their wedding night is a rom-com gone comically off the rails when the boy discovers, to his amazement, that he’s actually a girl, raised by his mom in order to achieve some status and authority in a man’s world. Voilà, medieval same-sex marriage, with the rider that in a fractious world ruled by capricious men (have you ever heard of such a thing?), silence is a woman’s best defence.
Silence, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price
King Ethelred (Phillip Addis), the Saxon monarch, is a dope, a weakling whose favourite location is bed, in the fetal position. His enabler is a manly knight (Clarence Frazer), and his inner tyrant is unlocked when it dawns on him what he’s missing, i.e. Ymma. And a pursuit ensues. There’s also religious satire: the pagan Silence, who has a native wit about him/her/them, is schooled in Christianity by a priest (Matthew Dalen) who’s been railroaded into celibacy. He’s a rom-com hero in waiting, a narrative development that includes Ymma’s maid Agnes (Rebecca Cuddy).
I only tell you all this so you get the gist of the complications of this venture. They escalate exponentially, in the way of a cross-century farce, when the characters attract, and are attracted by, exactly the wrong people. It’s a lot.
I had a chance to catch this original new addition to the opera repertoire this week, and was struck by the unexpected (to me) way that the artifices of opera can give the period rhythms of the language a kind of enjoyable natural comedy. It’s one thing for Agnes to speak of the vomit in her employer’s hair, and another, more amusing really, to sing it.
Cast of Silence, centre Lara Ciekiewicz and Teiya Kasahara 笠原 貞野, NUOVA Vocal Arts. Photo by Nanc Price
The cast of six in Kim Mattice Wanat’s production are all powerhouse singers — there’s nothing silent about Silence needless to say — and accomplished actors, with a six-member orchestra (directed by Gordon Gerrard) to match. And the characters do come vividly to life, in the dexterous storytelling of Hagen’s libretto. It brings them together in various configurations to address, each from a different angle, the intertwined themes of freedom and home.
As an innocent disconcerted by the successive stages of self-discovery, Silence, in Kasahara 笠原貞野’s performance, is an alert catalyst for the action, always in re-assessing mode. And their arias are full of jagged soaring intervals that speak (well, sing) to the always elusive identity quest of this appealing title protagonist. Ymma is feisty and smart, a wary survivor of trauma in Ciekiewicz’s musical and dramatic portrait. Her scenes with Silence are funny, and increasingly touching. Addis is a funny, then scary, king in charge. Times being what they are, the parallels aren’t just oblique.
To me, judging by this first outing for the new piece (handsomely appointed on a set by Daniela Masellis, lighted by Lieke den Bakker), the momentum of the story and the stagecraft start to unravel in the fragmentary last third of the piece. Despite the escalating pace of the narrative, the later scenes seem both cluttered and a bit inert. And the magic mushroom sequence, comical in theory, doesn’t quite land. But then, when do the dope-smoking scenes ubiquitous in stage sitcoms work either?
But Silence is a fascinating debut, ambitious and theatrically challenging. You can see the attraction of the play to an opera company — big characters that seem even bigger in a small-scale production, a fulsome story, a commanding sense of anachronism.
REVIEW
Silence
NUOVA Vocal Arts
Libretto by: Darrin Hagen adapted from the Moira Buffini play
Music by: Leslie Uyeda
Directed by: Kim Mattice Wanat
Starring: Clarence Frazer, Phillip Addis, Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野, Rebecca Cuddy, Matthew Dalen, Lara Ciekiewicz.
Where: Orange Hub, 10045 156 St.
Running: through June 27
Tickets: showpass.com
