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<i>there was a picture of william in yesterday's print edition of the independent; i can't find one online.</i>
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Frayed ticket to a bygone age

(Filed: 20/07/2004)

Ivan Hewitt reviews Man and Boy at the Almeida Festival

Obsession is clearly an obsessive topic for Michael Nyman. His first opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was about a man who coped with a mental problem by repeating melodies in his head. This new opera Man and Boy concerns the unlikely relationship between the ageing and ailing Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, exiled in wartime London, and the schoolboy who shares his obsession with collecting London Transport bus tickets.

These are congenial topics for Nyman because obsessiveness is his music's natural state. He takes a tiny idea such as a back-and-forth motion between two chords, and worries away at it relentlessly. The moment it's wrung dry he drops it without remorse and leaps straight to a new one.

It's a style that can whip up an extraordinary tension, provided the joins between one idea and the next are razor-sharp - which, unfortunately, wasn't always the case in this performance by the Almeida Ensemble, which had more than a few ragged edges.

What's new about this opera is the way obsessiveness has been given a tender, nostalgic tone. Writing this opera has clearly been a trip down memory lane for Nyman and his librettist Michael Hastings, who were both avid collectors of bus tickets and football cards in the post-war years.

But there's a patterned formality about the back-projected images and the set design (rows of cubes that can be bus seats or a sitting room), which keeps sentimentality at bay.

When Michael introduces Schwitters to his mother an unlikely romance blossoms between the lonely and rather prim Englishwoman and the eccentric German artist with a penchant for giving hilarious impromptu imitations of the sound and flight of a doodlebug.

<b>William Sheldon gives an astonishingly assured performance as the 13-year-old Michael, negotiating Nyman's often wilfully awkward lines with total aplomb.

And he's a considerable actor, too. There was a wonderful moment when his hostility towards this annoying rival for discarded bus tickets softens into smiling complicity. But moments later, when a really good specimen comes into view, he hardens again.

These were moments of everyday emotional truth of a sort one rarely sees on the operatic stage.</b>

John Graham-Hall is marvellous as the tall, threadbare, visionary artist, who tries to get Michael and his mother to understand his odd art, but, in the end, seems to have doubts about its usefulness, or even its humanity.

It was a nicely ambiguous ending to a subtle and touching piece of music-theatre.
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As a schoolboy in Fifties Chingford, Essex, composer Michael Nyman used to collect bus tickets. Recently, he discovered that the same was true of his friend, playwright Michael Hastings, who muses: 'We were perhaps unconsciously trying, as kids, to restore order to the ruined city around us.' So they decided, unlikely as it may sound, to write an opera set in postwar London about a schoolboy who collects bus tickets.

The missing link was Nyman's simultaneous discovery that the Hanover-born artist Kurt Schwitters, eventually exiled in Britain after fleeing Germany in 1937, also collected London bus tickets to paste on to his Dada collages. So Nyman's latest opera, Man and Boy: Dada, to a libretto by Hastings, opens with the short-trousered schoolboy and this sinister 60-year-old stranger fighting over a discarded bus ticket, a rare blue one each covets.

The piece develops into a rite of passage for both, with the boy's widowed mother caught uncomfortably in the middle. It ends, surreally enough, with the artist asking the child (who just happens to be called Michael) what he needs to make a toothbrush 'something less than evil'. Instinctively, Michael replies: 'Toothpaste?'

If all this sounds as pretentious as the work's title, you'd be surprised how many quite touching moments librettist and composer manage to work into this least likely of operatic scenarios.

Together, man and boy get into trouble for painting graffiti on to a civic lion. In the central scene, Schwitters promises the boy a bicycle for his birthday, only to reduce him to tears by producing a mangled Dada bike to hang on his wall. 'What kind of man are you?' asks the mother, with whom he has meanwhile started flirting. 'I'm not sure,' replies Schwitters.

Nor are we, really, even when it's all over (in just under two hours), beyond the obvious fact that he is as much boy as man, on a voyage of self-discovery paralleling the child's. An isolated and enigmatic figure, intimately interacting with a 12-year-old schoolboy, the Schwitters of this opera at times evokes a Britten anti-hero minus the pederasty.

The music does not: it is standard Nyman, ritornelli-strewn riffs rambling between the brooding and the jaunty, nostalgia and postmodernism, embellished by jagged, often disjointed vocal lines, and climaxing in a sadly turgid tango.

In Lindsay Posner's straightforward enough production, heavily reliant on video imagery from Jeremy Herbert, the work's British premiere at the Almeida Opera Festival centres around an engaging if vocally stentorian performance from tenor John Graham-Hall as Schwitters, with the reliable soprano Vivien Tierney as Mother and a remarkably assured young treble, William Sheldon, as Michael. The Almeida's small but lively ensemble is conducted by Paul McGrath.

Nyman recently described himself, with commendable candour, as 'a composer known for appropriating and recycling the material of others'.

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Man and Boy: Dada

Michael Nyman, best known for his film scores for Peter Greenaway and Jane Campion, celebrates his 60th birthday this year with a chamber opera set in post-war London. It centres around an imagined friendship that builds up around the Dada-influenced collagist-in-exile Kurt Schwitters and a young boy, based on their mutual fascination for bus tickets. While the boy collects them to bring order to his collection, for Schwitters they constitute elements of his abstract, chaotic artworks.

The production, by Linsday Posner, heavily draws upon innovative video and graphics prepared by James Herbert, which can either set the context or the scene. The three main characters - Schwitters, the boy Michael and his mother - make a dynamically engaged, close-knit trio dramatically but the 19 scenes of the scenario are not always satisfyingly paced. The inclusion of a BBC interview for the third programme, in which Schwitters barely gets a word in, contributes little and there is a tedious degree of prosaic exchanges. But the opera does leave an impression of how Schwitters' refreshing world view - virtuosically articulated in two sound-poems, mimicking a sneeze and a doodlebug - could win people over.
The metrical rhythms of Nyman's score are well handled by the Almeida Ensemble under Paul McGrath, although with some instruments amplified the singers occasionally sounded overshadowed. Which is a shame, as each of them - John Graham Hall as Schwitters, Vivian Tierney as the mother and treble William Sheldon as Michael - each put in convincing and strongly sung performances.
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July 17, 2004

Man and Boy: Dada

John Allison

Opera

Almeida, N1

IN OPERA, it’s seldom the plot that redeems the music. Quite the opposite: where, for instance, would Aida be without Verdi’s magnificent score? If there is anything noteworthy about the British premiere of Michael Nyman’s new opera, Man and Boy: Dada, it is the fact that the potentially fatal effect of some rubbishy music is softened by a poignant scenario and strong performance.
Set in London in 1945, the opera relates an imaginary incident in the life of the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, whom we first encounter scrambling on the floor of a bus to find a ticket for one of his collages.

Chasing the same object is the young Michael, who wants it for his collection of bus tickets. Their rivalry quickly leads to ill-feeling, but gradually a touching connection develops, not least because the old refugee from Nazi Germany is almost child-like in his outlook on life. Michael and his mother may not understand Schwitters’s art, but they are all drawn together.

Quite what a self-respecting theatre like the Almeida is doing with the shallow Nyman is anyone’s guess, though this suspiciously late entry into the season did make neatly convenient sense. It was billed as a tribute to the composer’s 60th birthday, his coming of bus-pass age, but had already been premiered in March in Karlsruhe. Its London setting could at least have been said to have local interest — what a pity the librettist Michael Hastings didn’t shift his story to the Ulan Bator omnibus.

Nyman’s music is so utterly predictable: no hint of Dada here, then. The unrelenting figurations and awkward gearshifts suggest a rather basic technique, and the only moments of real expression are in the parodistic tea-dance passages. Orchestration seems to remain a closed book for Nyman, since his scoring for small band lacks variety, but the Almeida Ensemble chugged their way through valiantly under Paul McGrath’s direction. Worst of all, Nyman is a mangler of the English language: Hastings’s libretto, his first, has some witty lines, but its quality is obscured by the music.

What makes the show almost bearable are three very fine portrayals and a haunting production by Lindsay Posner. Jeremy Herbert’s set consists of just 35 seat-high cubes, but he adds beautiful stage-wide video images of everything from bombed-out London to bus maps and tea cups. John Graham-Hall is superb as the manic Schwitters, and with the help of Vivian Tierney’s warm Mother and <b>William Sheldon’s confident Michael</b> saves what is otherwise a horrible bus-smash of a piece.

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