An ambitious stage work composed by Damon Albarn proves there is hope for "fusion".
Recent attempts to popularise opera have not been resoundingly successful. Last autumn's Gaddafi, a collaboration between English National Opera and the hip beat-makers Asian Dub Foundation, was the ultimate earnest failure. It was hailed for successfully bringing in a much-sought-after younger audience, and certainly ticked the box marked "adventurous" - but it was widely panned for its dreary execution. "If this is fusion, give me fission any time," Peter Conrad wrote in this magazine.
The curator Alex Poots was behind Gaddafi, and, as director of the inaugural Manchester International Festival, he boldly set himself up for another fall, commissioning as the centrepiece of the festival an opera based on the 16th-century Chinese folk tale "Journey to the West", better known as the myth-cycle of the monkey king. It is directed by Chen Shi-Zheng and co-produced with the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin.
The potentially fatal fusion aspect resides in the choice of Damon Albarn as composer and his Gorillaz collaborator Jamie Hewlett as designer. With 181 people credited in the programme, 190 costumes, a ten-metre-high Buddha statue, acrobats, contortionists, armed unicyclists and gods on Rollerblades, the show could well have ended up being a colossal white elephant. On stilts.
If "fusion" is a poisoned chalice, someone involved in this production has been glugging the antidote, because Monkey: Journey to the West works. Hewlett's playful comic-book style is impeccably applied to the stage and set, Albarn's musical globetrotting doesn't fail him, and some of China's finest performers - actors, singers, acrobats, martial artists - are skilfully united under Shi-Zheng's direction. It's not as if Monkey is a story that needs embellishment, such is its imaginative zeal. Hatched from an egg, the simian of the title learns magic and kung fu, attains immortality, leads a revolt against heaven, and, after 500 years of imprisonment, proceeds on a Wizard of Oz-like quest through the bizarre, the sacred and the profane to find enlightenment.
A sense of childlike wonder characterises the entire show. When a shrimp juggles parasols with her feet while being pushed around in a shopping trolley by a purple octopus, you would have to be on the wrong side of cynical not to smile. Hewlett's dazzling animations, at once sophisticated and full of fun, happily coexist with the live acting, creating a mind-melding combination of pre-prepared visuals and live acrobatics: sort of "opera 2.0". His influence on the costume design, embracing everything from elegant floral dresses to BMX helmets and futuristic red military gear, is also a huge boon.
Though Hewlett's role is unimpeachable, Albarn's compositions are not always perfect. Sparse mandolin picking and the "clack clack" of woodblocks do the job, but all too often blur into a meditative drone, sitting quietly in the background of the performance, as if he didn't want to turn the show into a competition between sound and vision. To be fair, when you're watching a man doing a one-armed handstand on top of another man's head, any music will probably lose any such contest. Yet Albarn's relative coyness is a shame, because his bolder efforts are impressive, particularly when he engages several of the female singers in a perfect homage to what is known as "cantopop" or "c-pop" - China's and, in particular, Hong Kong's melody-obsessed take on western pop music. At another point he offers an organ-led piece that could have come straight from The Magic Roundabout, a peculiar but not unpleasant accompaniment to lyrics pledging devotion to the Buddha.
A few technical difficulties take the edge off Monkey's ambition: at the performance I saw, there were some worrying wobbles on the props, and the subtitles fell disastrously out of sync a number of times, which was both con fusing and distracting. These were probably just teething problems, but another, more lasting directorial decision bemused me: the use of Pigsy, a former general banished to porcine mortality for flirting with a goddess at a sacred banquet. Pigsy is as musical as a caller to TalkSport - gruff, crude and masculine - and the actor Xu Kejia carries it off perfectly. But why give him two solo numbers in which he growls atonally? The actress Yao Ning ning, playing the monk Tripitaka, has a beautiful voice, and should be allowed to use it.
Such quibbles aside, you leave Monkey with the feeling that it is bound to have a far-reaching influence - or so I thought. Stopping off after the show at the appropriately named Old Monkey pub, a few streets away from the Palace Theatre, I found the leading attraction of the Manchester International Festival seemed to have made little impact on the regulars I spoke to. Suffice it to say that the question "Will you be checking out the Chinese monkey opera?" was met with a certain degree of consternation.
It is understandable that the festival has not managed to consume Manchester in a high fever of cultural enthusiasm just yet - you don't re-create something like Edinburgh overnight. Even so, on the night of the launch, the big entertainment news on the local TV station Channel M was not the opening of a sensational new festival with a work of searing originality, but rather that the Pop Idol has-been Gareth Gates had been performing at the Trafford Centre. Has opera become the people's art form of choice? Despite Monkey's spectacular levels of ambition, I'd have to say that that day is still a little way off.
"Monkey: Journey to the West" was part of the Manchester International Festival, which runs until 15 July at various venues. More info: http://www.manchesterinternationalfestival.com
The show opens at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, on 26 September (http://www.chatelet-theatre.com) and at the Berlin Staatsoper next summer
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
