Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

I.

At first in Benjamin Britten’s “Albert Herring”, the outsider is Albert Herring himself. This 1947 opera is an ensemble comedy about an inhibited and inhibiting rural community, in which Albert is crowned King of the May simply because he, a mother’s boy, has never had the nerve to misbehave. But the opera turns itself inside out in Act Two when Albert - unintentionally made drunk - has a long soliloquy when he begins for the first time to take charge of his own life.

In a long ensuing scene, when Albert is missing, the village mourns him as dead - then rounds on him in anger when he turns up alive and kicking. But he has learnt at last to stand up to his mother: we know that the village has begun to change. This is Britten rearranging the Suffolk community of the tragic “Peter Grimes” into comedy: wonderful that the same artist could see the same material from opposite points of view.

At first, “Albert Herring” seems somewhat laboured on Britten’s part - and yet even the opening scene plays well, soon getting the audience on its side. The opera then deepens, in a most touching way, with Albert’s expansive, drunken, nocturne solo. And though it seems terminally English, it has proved lovable abroad. (I first saw it in Darmstadt, well sung and well acted.)

At the London Coliseum on Monday 13, conducted by the admirable Daniel Cohen, it became part of English National Opera’s current return to form. (The company has never staged it before.) The wonderfully versatile Antony McDonald has directed and designed it as a semistaged event, with an assistant director present onstage throughout. Probably this device was forced on the production by limited rehearsal time - the current ENO season has had to materialise rapidly on the Coliseum stage, with three operas so far - but it’s effective, making us feel “Albert Herring” as a work in progress. ENO takes it to the Lowry, Salford, for two performances next week.

In the title role, Caspar Singh beautifully releases the lyricism of Albert’s night wandering, as well as showing the stiffly buttoned-up caricature that Albert is at first.  He’s at the heart of a lovely ensemble, amid which Leah-Marian Jones is his mother, Carolyn Dobbin (the controlling housekeeper Florence Pike), Aoife Miskelly (Miss Wordsworth), Eddie Wade (the vicar, Mr Gedge), Andri Björn Róbertsson (Superintendent Budd), and Mark Le Brocq (Mayor Upfold), while Anna Elizabeth Cooper and Dan D’Souza are the young lovers. I’ve never enjoyed the shrill and squally singing of Emma Bell, but she has a whale of a time as the alarmingly dominant Lady Billows.


II.

On the following night, Mitsuko Uchida played Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas at the Wigmore Hall. This wasn’t the most note-perfect rendition of Beethoven’s music, and yet it achieved something more: it took us into Beethoven’s mind as if these sonatas were Issuing directly from that. Even Uchida’s use of pedal -  heavily sustained at many moments, wonderfully contrasted with the brighter dynamics of her other playing - made me feel she was bringing us deep inside the echo-chamber inner world of this tragically deaf but still driven, still constantly experimental, still endlessly imaginative, always self-renewing composer. As she played them, these sonatas show music in a constant state of flux - now breaking down, now coming into new shape and focus, the pulse forever changing. Tragedy is often an element here; but only one.


III.

Of all the dance-makers who have emerged in this century, Hofesh Shechter has been leaving the most nebulous impression. Although I’ve missed many of his productions (including his stagings or plays and operas), those I have seen have often been borderline-incompetent, never showing why he has chosen these performers or why he finds them good.

After seeing his “Theatre of Dreams” at Sadler’s Wells on Wednesday (it continues till Saturday 18), I’m happy to reconsider Shechter completely. “Theatre of Dreams” is at first composed of maddeningly brief scenes that are at odds with one another. The dancers - seen at first only as sub-groups or soloists - dance vividly, juicily, through the whole body, but not to the music we’re hearing, and never to enough length for us to get a sense of the whole of which they’re apparently parts…. And when we do see all twelve of them - all looking as if Shechter has challenged them to look their best - they carry on redividing into three or four sub-groups, moving at different speeds, maybe one or more of them sometimes sharing the rhythms of the music that’s being played live onstage. We even see different sociologies, with different states of dress and undress.

What emerges from this is an impression of great human and structural complexity, with us being allowed only to glimpse parts of some much larger dance world(s), but with the dancers involved in various and intense folk styles In changing geometries across the stage. Upper and lower body are used in marked contrast. Insteps and hands play roles as lively as torsos and thighs. We even seem to see In one section, the rhythm onstage is so infectious that the audience joins in… until one of the cast invites people to sit down.

“Theatre of Dreams” keeps going after this exuberant climax. Just as you think it doesn’t know how to stop, it changes tack, carries on exhilaratingly - and then stops. This is a happy piece, but above all it is (happily) bewildering.

@Alastair Macaulay 2025