Running for over a fortnight and regularly presenting two or three different short works per programme, this year's Tête à Tête festival blends its own creations with shows emanating elsewhere that fit neatly into its free-and-easy format.
- Tête à Tête festival
- Until 22 August
- Box office:
020-8237 1111.
Even with repeat performances and staggered start times, it proved impossible to see all three shows playing the first evening. I was sorry to forgo Ergo Phizmiz's The Mourning Show, in which the Zoroastrian demon Ahriman apparently interrupts Chris Evans's Breakfast Show, causing Radio 2's prime asset to hurl himself from a fourth-floor window.
The other new opera, Krazy Kat, composed by Joanna Lee to a libretto by fellow composer Howard Skempton, seemed almost conventional by comparison. It's based on a long-running American comic strip, begun in 1913 by cartoonist George Herriman, in which the feline central character is repeatedly "beaned" by a mouse called Ignatz, "beaned" meaning to be hit on the head by a well-aimed brick. Krazy Kat responds to this maltreatment by adoring the perpetrator. One might see this as some profound metaphor for the human condition, or at least its amatory component. But Lee's fidgety score fought against the daffy inanity of the action. Maybe Skempton himself, the arch-exponent of musical simplicity, should have set it.
Altogether more resonant was The Lost Chord, devised by Tim Hopkins, in which the audience was seated around a Victorian dining table while songs from the period – notably iconic pieces by Sullivan and Balfe – were sung, interspersed with readings from Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson and various 19th-century encyclopaedias. A miniature piece of immersive music-theatre, the result was sombre, mysterious and deeply atmospheric, and included some genuinely moving singing from Geoffrey Dolton, Daniel Norman, Matthew Sharp and Nicholas Sharratt.
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