Benjamin’s Into The Little Hill is a masterpiece: Speech Acts at Shadwell Opera reviewed

Speech Acts
Shadwell Opera, Courtyard Theatre

Election time is upon us again. But before we arrive at the main event there are the warm-up acts – televised debates, broadsheet profiles and daytime television interviews – to be endured. Making this political stand-up more bearable are the intelligent heckles coming from the arts. London’s theatres are filled with issue-plays talking about all the topics the politicians aren’t – the housing crisis, NHS, life on the dole – but despite a rich seam of politically-charged works at its disposal (The Marriage of Figaro, Don Carlo, Boris Godunov among them), the main UK opera houses aren’t following suit. Which makes Speech Acts – a politically-charged double-bill from youthful Shadwell Opera – all the more welcome.

Facing off here are Stravinsky’s folk-parable-fairytale A Soldier’s Tale and George Benjamin’s exquisitely bleak reworking of the Pied Piper legend, Into The Little Hill – neither an explicitly political work, but each dealing in the fundamental, everyday currency of politics: promises, bargains and uneasy alliances.