Gaiman up: Coraline at the Barbican
Coraline
The Royal Opera
Barbican Theatre
Upper Circle B49, £10
3 April 2018
ROH page
The main problem is that I like Neil Gaiman’s story Coraline a lot and have apparently quite set ideas about it. Thus even though the Royal Opera’s new opera adaptation is excellently sung and played, has some very snazzy set designs and is as polished as you could wish for in terms of libretto and score, it doesn’t emphasize enough or even at all the things I think are coolest about the original, and so never feels more than meh.
I love Turnage’s early opera Greek and cleave to that as the standard for what his music can be. Lately I’ve had to cleave quite hard in the face of current evidence, in which Greek’s youthful energy and wit is sacrificed for a mealy-mouthed pallor. Sadly this is the case with Coraline, where I get the sense that Turnage is more concerned with doing a good job than having fun. The results are in some ways laudable – the writing for voice is supremely sensitive; the orchestration is very pleasing – but also miss opportunities. The book is renowned for frightening its readers, children and adults alike, and surely there’s so much scope to manifest this danger musically. But the sound world Turnage gives the other mother is of more or less the same character as everything else. She’s just not that scary, and as a consequence Coraline is just not that cool.
Librettist Rory Mullarkey also extracts from the book to emphasize the safer rather than the weirder. Some of this is just the perhaps insurmountable difficulty of adapting for stage. The story of Coraline’s father’s bravery, where we learn true courage is not when he instinctively saves Coraline from a swarm of bees, but when he has to face the bees alone to retrieve his glasses, is in the book a linchpin, arguably the core encapsulation of its central message. It works perfectly when written down. It’s not so great in a libretto – it becomes a long and complicated aria for Coraline that feels tangential from the action around it; not so much a linchpin as a cuttable boring bit. Could another route have been taken to convey this message? This lack of imagination is compounded by what feels to me like a lack of faith. Mullarkey carefully makes sure there are jokes for the adults as well as jokes for the kids – whereas Gaiman expects everyone to find everything interesting.
So perhaps this isn’t everything a Coraline opera could be, and, to be fair, perhaps no adaptation could please me as much as the original. But this is almost as good a production of a new chamber opera as you could hope for. Every singer was strong and their diction excellent. Special praise goes to Robyn Allegra Parton, alternating with Mary Bevan as Coraline but here singing the other mother from the side of the stage for an indisposed Kitty Whately, valiantly, robustly and again with completely audible words. The Britten Sinfonia played with clarity and precision, although were weirdly amplified – from where I was I could hear them only through the speakers, not acoustically at all. There was further amplification weirdness from the three offstage singers, somewhat unflattering to the performers who sounded much more confident when on stage. Lastly, director Aletta Collins and set designer Giles Cadle have done a superbly imaginative job, translating the magic of Gaiman’s world onto the stage with a success I only wish Turnage and Mullarkey could have approached.
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