Great expectations | 19 July 2006

PUSH! is the first opera about childbirth, so Tête à Tête claims, and I’m sure rightly. Opera usually likes to concentrate on the other end of life, audiences much preferring to see people leaving than arriving. It would be absurd to make very large claims for PUSH!, and I’m sure Tête à Tête wouldn’t want to. It is a brilliantly entertaining and in two prolonged scenes moving piece, with a dazzling text by Anna Reynolds and effective music by David Bruce. The action takes place in a delivery room, five women giving birth, interspersed with a couple of cleaners mopping up, and finally and triumphantly the female cleaner herself gives birth, just after, or more or less during, her day’s routine mopping-up — someone else will have to clean up after her.

Most of the scenes are funny, with excellent visual gags — any dedicated attender of this superb company’s shows will know how resourceful the producer Bill Bankes-Jones is at combining colourful scenery and extravagant but ordinary gesturing to gain comic effects which the directors of most comic operas couldn’t dream of.