Fiona Fullerton meets Kate Bush in Barbara Hannigan’s ‘Alice’. Photo: Mark Allan/Barbican
Barbican Centre, London
By Richard Whitehouse
You had to hand it to Gerald Barry, whose stage works are nothing if not consistent. Having stripped away most of the irony in his adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, he returned with a scorched-earth take on Lewis Carroll, whose brace of Alice novels was duly boiled down to a 55-minute continuity of a dozen or so ‘situations’ under the author’s working title. The result was a cartoon sequence nonpareil. Fancy a trilingual rendering of the Jabberwocky? Humpty Dumpty’s ditties set to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’? Barry guessed you were coming and, in the panache with which he brought off such japes, did not let you down.
What you didn’t find in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is subtlety of response to Carroll’s insights into childlike naivety – as yet another opera fell prey to half-baked Ligeti-isms, with a likely debt to the Alice series by American maverick David del Tredici. This latter grappled with modernist pitfalls of four decades ago; Barry seemed transfixed by the clichés of postmodernism as might a rabbit in the headlights – spellbound if unaware of his own limitations.
No such limitations were evident among the cast. Barbara Hannigan rendered the title role in a ‘Fiona Fullerton meets Kate Bush’ manner that was visceral and always virtuosic; Allison Cook’s and Hilary Summers’s respective Red and White Queens typified the acuity of their contribution; while Allan Clayton, Peter Tantsits, Mark Stone and Joshua Bloom each veered between roles with heady abandon. Thomas Adès directed Britten Sinfonia with a technical precision and expressive focus that boded well for their Barry/Beethoven cycle next year.
The almost-capacity audience audibly relished the highjinx of Barry’s antics conceptual and musical, according the performers a warm reception at the end. The staging, when it happens, will doubtless be equally well attended. No doubt, too, this composer will oblige with further spectacles in due course. But emerging from behind all the pizazz, studied humour and anarchic pretence was the unmistakable sound of a creative barrel being well and truly scraped. 