Classical and Jazz: review of The Lion's Face by Elena Langer - Linbury Studio Theatre
Published: 12 August, 2010
by SEBASTIAN TAYLOR
AN opera about dementia? Not opera buffa, that’s for sure. But new work The Lion’s Face by Elena Langer does succeed in shining a musical light on a subject that’s rarely treated in the communicative arts world.
The two-act production by the Opera Group received its London premiere recently at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre. Told through theatre and music, the story follows four characters touched in different ways by memory loss and ageing.
There’s a trivial event to start with – a man forgets his own birthday. But the event gains significance as his hard-pressed wife, his carer and the carer’s daughter come face to face with his on-setting dementia.
Composer Elena Langer and librettist Glyn Maxwell went to great lengths over five years to research the background to the incurable disease, receiving help from Professor Simon Lovestone and his team at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London.
In the piece, the dementia-sufferer is a spoken role amid three other singers, thereby emphasising the gulf between sufferer and stranger. The wife seeks to rekindle her husband’s memory, showing him an album of family photos, getting him out of his chair to dance as they did in the past. Oddly though, there’s no attempt to rekindle his memory by playing his favourite music, which would seem so appropriate in a dementia opera.
The same can be said about another new opera, Into the Little Hill by George Benjamin, also performed at the Linbury.
Although based on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, there were no beautiful melodies for brilliant Hampstead soprano Claire Booth to win the hearts of the rats – of Hamelin’s children either.