Excellent comic opera

Press, 29 November 1976, Page 6

Excellent comic opera

“The Fisherman and His Wife,” by Kit Powell and Graeme Tetley, directed by Don McAra.

“Mr Bones and Mr Jones,” by Eve Hughes, directed by Geoffrey Shepherd. Christchurch Teachers’ College Drama Workshop, Dovedale Avenue, November 27—December 2. Running time: 8.00-10.15 p.m.

When the Brothers Grimm recorded the tale of the fisherman and his hubristic fishwife, they showed little concern for the story’s stage viability. After all, even the heights of extravagance of the nineteenth-century stage could scarcely accommodate a fish with a mouth five feet wide which is hooked out of the sea. which eats a man whole, and which indulges a woman in the extremities of her vanity—all in full view of the audience. But nor, for that matter, was Homer thinking of the Christchurch stage when he wrote the “Odyssey”—and that did not deter the enterprise and inventiveness of the Linwood High School staff members, who are also behind the music and script of this production. Kit Powell, has, as always, come up with a score of extraordinary narrative interest and expressivity. He himself directs the chorus, soloists, and orchestra, which obviously includes a number of accomplished and versatile instrumentalists. It is not difficult to detect the energy, resourcefulness, and inspiration of Don McAra behind most of the direction, though it would be quite impossible for an outsider to allocate praise for the continuous stream of scintillating ideas and production devices, a lot of which must have come from Graeme Tetley and others. For example. I would like to know where the visual effects came from: the cutout brass band, the dancing dummies, the fish itself, and numerous others.

Generally, this is a comic opera very well suited to an educational environment: so many different things are done that every participant is continuously involved in a very complex exercise in

theatrical co-ordination, which must leave everyone with a very “total” sense of theatre. From the point of view of theatre education, the production can scarcely be over-praised. It is in the nature of this sort of script that there should be little individuality in performance, and in tije dance, mime, and acting there was a strong atmosphere of cohesion, with none of the upstaging that can easily emerge in this kind of work.

Would that, on Saturday, the same could be said of the stage crew, whose suicidal acrobatics across the lighting grid were the more conspicuous because the stage sight-lines were atrocious. However, if the average anonymous performance is creditable, those of the few soloists are very good indeed: Russell Holmes makes a very appealing fisherman, and an unspecified actor makes an efficient job of being eaten by the fish, to emerge recycled in a profusion of forms, including that of a papal attendant.

But the star of the show is Lesley Kitchen as the wife, a part so demanding that only

a very skilled adult performer could get through it: in all, she has to sing, act, and otherwise .engineer her way through the six different metamorphoses that the fish contrives for her, culminating in a difficult solo done suspended from a rope eight feef above the stage.

“The Fisherman and His Wife” offers 70 minutes of excellent comic opera (a totally different thing from musical farce). Though most youngsters on Saturday clearly enjoyed it, this is primarily an adult show, and is very much worth seeing—even if. to be sure of seeing it completely, you should book front-row seats.

From the audience’s response, the first play was also to be judged a significant success: Eve Hughes’s satirical exercise in biracial sociology. Personally, I found it in most respects inferior to the Canterbury Repertory premiere of 1971, though with sufficient originality to make it interesting and entertaining, and to bring a very stimulating script alive for those who have not seen it before .

—Howard McNaughton