Based on a Steven Berkoff play, and first performed in the late 1980s, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Greek presents the increasingly unhinged story of a young Londoner who strides out to make his way in the world, and encounters sex, violence and some uncomfortable Oedipal parallels along the way. This plays out on stage in the form of a small, casually-dressed cast, inventively manipulating the scenery to provide a shifting backdrop of imagery and music. They lead us through the story with plot points marked not only through the lyrics (in English), but also through the clever use of projections, props and musical motifs.
The opera is presented in two halves by Music Theatre Wales. Unfortunately, the first half threatened to become unintentionally comic, due to a combination of some slightly off London accents – a touch of the Mary Poppins-cockney in evidence – and a rather laboured buildup of the plot’s framework. However, the second half was great – a very satisfying set of payoffs for everything that had gone before, delivered in a much more dynamic, succinct fashion, which ramped up the surreality of the storyline before leading to a madness-meets-melodrama ending.
Musically, it was surprising that the voices didn’t seem as booming and, well, operatic as expected – but still they were powerful and flexible. The score, created by a small ensemble of around twenty musicians, is an effective combination of free jazz and taut classical burbling, which could be challenging if listened to in isolation, but which fitted perfectly with the visual spectacle of the performance. Alongside more traditional instrumentation, there were some neat touches like the rhythms played out on police riot shields and the stamps of the entire cast and crew. It’s a clever, subtle score – holding back in hyped-up drama but gradually building up tension and mania throughout the entire piece.
Oxford Playhouse are keen to broaden their remit to include more musical events, and to tempt in more ‘young folk’, and Greek isn’t a bad part of that process. Opera is somewhat uncharted territory for me; before this performance my only exposure had been a rather brutal introduction by way of a lengthy Wagner recital. From the perspective of a ‘newbie’, with musical interests that lie in experimental, yet less ‘classical’ areas, Greek was a great production. Accessible enough to not intimidate, whilst proficient and tough enough to seem, for want of a more elegant term, ‘real’.