review from last year in Prague Michael Nyman's Dada opera

Czech Business Weekly By: Marek Tomin, 11. 04. 2005


Make room for Dada

Minimalist opera deserves maximum exposure

With just three characters, Michael Nyman’s opera Man and Boy: Dada, set in postwar London, is a minimalist tour de force. Extraordinarily, however, since its Czech premiere four months ago it has gone largely unnoticed.

Written by Nyman while he was composer-in-residence at the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, Germany, the opera had its world premiere on March 13, 2004. Subsequent productions were staged at London’s Almeida Theater in the summer of 2004 and later that year in the United States. The English libretto by Michael Hastings is a quirky treatment of a particular segment of the life of Kurt Schwitters, one of the founders of the Dada art movement.

Wandering aimlessly around London after spending World War II in exile, Schwitters meets a boy on a bus as they both indulge their passion, collecting used bus tickets. While the boy seeks order by making a perfect collection, for Schwitters the bus ticket symbolizes yet another aspect of the chaos that is both his life and his art – those being, ultimately, one and the same. Throughout the two-act opus, Schwitters tries to confront the boy with his vision of life as art (and art as life), with sometimes disastrous and often hilarious consequences. As their friendship develops, Schwitters meets the boy’s mother, who lost her husband during the bombing of London, and reconciliation between Germans and Brits becomes another aspect of the story.

The Prague production, which premiered Dec. 4 and returns to the Estates Theater this week, employs the core of the Karlsruhe team, headed by American director Robert Tannenbaum and stage designer Peter Werner, but uses new vocalists. Karolína Berková excels as the boy, while American tenor James Clark puts in a capable performance as Schwitters. Jiřina Marková-Krystlíková, a professor at the Prague Conservatory, does a fine job as the boy’s mother, especially during the more comic moments.

The Czech modern-music ensemble Agon Orchestra, headed by Petr Kofroň, copes skillfully with Nyman’s eclectic score, which uses elements of swing punctuated by sudden mood changes and pulses of discord, emphasizing the plot without drowning out the vocalists. The stage design is simple but highly effective, employing Schwitters’ own dynamic collages and assemblages. Hastings' adroit, tender and at times extremely funny libretto makes brilliant use of colloquial English (capably subtitled in Czech).

While both the Karlsruhe and London productions opened amid much publicity and acclaim, Prague's National Theater did little to promote Man and Boy (relative to one of its “classic” productions, anyway). When I saw the opera’s third and most recent performance on Feb. 1 the magnificent Estates was not even half full. A work by one of the most popular composers working in contemporary music (Nyman did the score for The Piano and several Peter Greenaway films), especially one this well-crafted and invigorating, deserves better.

need to know

Man and Boy: Dada
Where: Stavovské divadlo
When: April 16 and 19, 7 p.m.
How Much: Kč 30-1,000
Info: www.narodni-divadlo.cz