Paul Williams
The infamous Old Vic Tunnels, home to years of innovative events under Waterloo Station, has teamed up with Heritage Arts and IdeasTap to deliver the first VAULT festival. A swathe of secret adventures and oddball cabaret is on the lineup but, curiously, one of the headline acts of the three weeks is a production of Puccini’s popular opera La Bohème. If you’re wondering what tenors and sopranos are doing within the graffitied walls of Leake Street, fear not – Silent Opera is a fun promenade refresh on the classic libretto, a story of high culture and low living made accessible to the opera agnostic.
Once issued a set of wireless headphones, we are invited upstairs to a squalid London loft conversion on Christmas Eve 2011. The audience pack in on bean bags and dirty mattresses to share an evening with four young artists as they freeze in their woollen gloves, dining on stolen noodles and vodka. Director and Librettist Daisy Evans strikes a clever balance between a ‘proper’ and accessible opera experience, exchanging the Parisian Latin Quarter for derelict nightclubs and credit card fraud. This clever twenty-first century translation rejuvenates the original story and music of La Bohème with a more relatable and invigorating personality. The performers are both loveable comics and high-calibre singers skilfully switching between laddish humour and melodrama – if perhaps not holding up to a stringent critique from an opera aficionado. For the rest of us, the production gleefully upends convention and allows an uninitiated audience into the heart of a great classic.
An ambitious experiment such as this will inevitably have a few loose ends. A packed house, with a huge diversity in ages, is a glowing testament to the appeal of the Silent Opera idea, but forms a literal roadblock to enjoying an unbroken experience. Ushers take care of crowd management and add flourish to the action, but there is a feeling the space is far over capacity. Long transitions between locales grind the immersion to a temporary halt, as the massive audience awkwardly shuffles towards a narrow staircase or doorway during a dramatic crescendo. A lone reviewer can be politely proactive but, for groups or audience members with accessibility requirements, there’s a lottery for a decent view. Headphones provide a compromise as you can still listen to the performance, but it’s easy to visually miss out. Come prepared to move.
Despite suffering a little from its own success, Silent Opera delivers an engaging evening of opera for the uninitiated. Surprisingly, La Bohème is only the company’s second show since its debut in 2011, with a production of Monteverdi’s L‘Orfeo arriving later this year. Having won the attentions of a number of supporters, the future is looking very promising for Silent Opera’s particular brand of alternative re-imaginings of great works. Try to get in on the action now before they hit the big time, and look forward to seeing more from this company in future.
La Bohème is running at the Old Vic Tunnels until the 26 of February. For more information and tickets, see the VAULT Festival website.