Michael Tanner

Plazas in pain

Letters of a Love Betrayed<br /> Linbury Studio Carmen<br /> Royal Opera House Wozzeck<br /> Royal Festival Hall

issue 17 October 2009

Letters of a Love Betrayed
Linbury Studio

Carmen
Royal Opera House

Wozzeck
Royal Festival Hall

A hectic operatic week, three down and two (to be reviewed next week) to go, began lamentably with what I’m in danger of coming to think of as the archetypical Linbury experience. That hideous place, a kind of operatic Nibelheim under the Valhalla of the Royal Opera, has seats so cramped and uncomfortable that I can only think that their point is to ensure one stays awake, as one witnesses another première which seems destined to be also a dernière. Eleanor Alberga’s Letters of a Love Betrayed, with libretto by Donald Sturrock from the story by Isabel Allende, received in many, though not all, ways a better performance than it deserved from Music Theatre Wales, with Mary Plazas, a superb and committed artist, giving yet another portrayal of pain turning to agony, with arbitrarily contrived final happiness, unusual for her, at the end.

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