The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park: Wagner's elemental tale is given a progressive spin
Pity Wagner's heroines, always having to save some errant man from hell or a guilty conscience. In his early masterpiece The Flying Dutchman, the male hero is a sailor, unwise enough to curse the Almighty when He sends him an unfavourable wind. And so he's doomed to sail the seas until a good woman saves him and sacrifices herself in the process.
It's 19 th -century patriarchy on steroids, as Julia Burbach's intelligent new production for OHP makes abundantly clear. As is the fashion nowadays, the opera's essential theme is presented before the curtain officially opens, during Wagner's overture. A troop of pining blonde girls in nighties and macs drifts into Naomi Dawson's cleverly designed set, roaming up the narrow and alarmingly tilted platform behind the orchestra on which is the modest bric-a-brac of the heroine Senta's home – bed, table, hard chair. They continue around the orchestra to what seems like a beach at the front of the stage. They are the Eternal Feminine, anxiously looking for a man to rescue. Soon uncanny masked figures appear, premonitions of the supernatural Dutchman's ghostly crew.
It's this elemental world of the sea the production stresses, while the solid bourgeois world of Senta's sailor father Daland – who's keen to marry Senta off to the rich, roving Dutchman – is barely hinted at. Senta, touchingly played by Eleanor Dennis, is the very submissive centre amidst the swirling sailor activity and orchestral din, singing of her obsession with a picture of the Dutchman in a voice of such pearly delicacy you could hardly hear it. Her father Daland is somewhat blandly characterized by Robert Winslade Anderson, and the Dutchman played by Paul Carey Johnson is frankly a bit wooden and formal when he first meets Senta. One felt his suffering but not his uncanny power.
All this meant the production – suggestive though it is of the opera's underlying themes, and buoyed by sensitive playing from the City of London Sinfonia under conductor Peter Selwyn – needed a dramatic shot in the arm. That was delivered not a moment too soon by Neal Cooper as Senta's betrothed Erik. His aria where he laments Senta's obsession with the Dutchman was truly agonised. He paced about like a tormented caged bear, his voice cracking with emotion. Senta, who until that point had seemed rather milk-and-water, her annoyance with her teasing friends a bit too schoolgirls-larking-in-the-dormitory, suddenly discovered her true stature.
In the final scenes the opera really caught fire. The sailors' terrified discovery of the cursed Dutchman's ship was a superb swirl of movement, lit with lurid effectiveness as if from the pit of hell by Robert Price. In the final scene, where Senta promises to go with the Dutchman to the ends of earth, Eleanor Dennis unleashed a vocal power one had never suspected. The orchestral din was thrilling, as were the chorus's terrified outbursts. Nature obligingly lent a hand, rattling the walls of Opera Holland Park's canvas venue with a strong wind.
So a wonderful elemental ending, which really got to the heart of Wagner's drama. It's just a shame the production took a while to reach it.
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