Review - Chamber Pot Opera - bontom, Sydney, AUS

✭✭✭✭✩

created by Keiren Brandt-Sawdy, Thomas De Angelis and Clemence Williams, directed by Clemence Williams

bontom, Queen Victoria Building, Sydney, AUS

June 4-July 22, 2017;

Assembly Hall Bathrooms, Edinburgh, GBR

August 4-26, 2017

“Bathroom Divas”

I had a decision to make during a short stay in Sydney. Should I see an opera at the Sydney Opera House or should a see an opera sung in a ladies’ loo at a downtown galleria? I chose the latter and did not for a minute regret my choice. It helped that I had already seen several operas at the SOH and the one currently running was of little interest. It also helped that I had never seen an opera staged in a ladies’ powder room of any kind as was curious how such a show could be managed.

The Ladies’ Powder Room on the second floor of the Queen Victoria Building is no ordinary loo. The QVB is a grand Romanesque Revival structure completed in 1898. By the 1950s the building came to be seen as a white elephant and was was threatened with demolition until a Malaysian company bought it and restored it in 2009. This included the Ladies’ Powder Room, approximately 15 feet by 18 feet, with three wooden doored stalls facing three sinks with ample mirrors and makeup lights. For the show designer Isabel Hudson has placed a large round ottoman in the centre of the space. The space holds an audience of 26, standing and seated, most along the wall across from the entrance between the stalls and the wash basins. The orchestra consists of Darci Gayford at an electric piano tucked in a recess probably used as a diaper changing area.

Knowing nothing about the piece except that it concerned three women who meet in a ladies room, I was surprised when Woman 1 entered and began singing Dido’s famous aria “When I am laid in earth” from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689). As Woman 1 sings the aria she pulls up her sleeves examining her bruises and takes out a bottle of pills presumably with the intention of committing suicide. Immediately we realize how cleverly the creators have given the classic aria a contemporary meaning, Sally Alrich-Smyth played Woman 1 as if she were in such an abusive relationship that the only escape she can think of is death.

Woman 1’s preparations for suicide are interrupted by the arrival of Woman 3 causing Woman 1 to flee to one of the stalls. Our next surprise is that Woman 3 begins singing Carmen’s signature number, the habanera “L'amour est un oiseau rebelle” from Georges Bizet’s famous opera (1875). (English surtitles are projected on the wall above the sinks for all the foreign-language lyrics.) Woman 3 has entered carrying a red dress that she casts down on the ottoman as if in some perplexity. Gazing at herself in the central mirror she adjusts her lipstick but then proceeds to draw a curling moustache and a goatee on her face. Without changing the words of the aria, Woman 3 gives us the impression that she just had a date

with another woman and is wondering whether she has come on too strong and whether she should care.

Woman 3’s meditations are interrupted when Woman 2 enters singing and texting Mozart’s “Voi che sapete”, Cherubino’s aria from Act 2 of The Marriage of Figaro (1786). Woman 2 is the only woman whom designer Hudson has clad in pants, a witty reminder that Cherubino is one of the more famous “trouser roles” in opera. Gayford haltingly plays the piano to match Woman 3’s rhythm in texting the words to her aria.

Upon seeing Woman 2, it occurs to Woman 3 that they two may have had a one-night stand together. This leads them both to join in the well-known barcarolle “Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour” from Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881), where in the original one of the roles is again a trousers role. Following this scene of reconnection, the two women perceive that someone has overheard them from one of the stalls. They coax Woman 1 out and try to cheer her up and help her to cope with her situation.

I won’t relate the entire plot since so much of the fun of the work depends on the surprise of what famous aria comes next and how that aria has been so cleverly repurposed for the new story the creators have envisioned. The show is so imaginative that I doubt you’ll be able to hear the “Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’s Lakmé (1883) ever again without thinking of toilet paper and bubbles.

The show is witty not only in placing well-known arias in radically different contexts but in redefining the roles typically given women in opera – “witches, bitches and breeches” as the director puts it. Yes, Woman 1 is a victim, as are most women in opera who are not evil, but the point of Chamber Pot Opera is to depict strong women helping Woman 1 overcome her overwhelming feeling of victimhood.

The 45-minute-long piece is the co-creation of playwright Thomas De Angelis, music director Keiren Brandt-Sawdy and director Clemence Williams for the company they call bontom. It works so well because the three singers have been

directed with such detail and truth to life by Williams and because the three singers are so totally committed to their characters. It’s a thrilling experience to hear opera sung and acted by singers who are just inches away.

Sally Alrich-Smyth, Britt Lewis and Jessica Westcott as Women 1, 2 and 3 all given impeccable performances, perfectly judging just how much to project in the wonderfully resonant acoustics of a tiled powder room. Alrich-Smyth uses her lush mezzo-soprano to plumb the depths of her troubled character and has us on tenterhooks right until the end wondering how her character will resolve her fate. In addition to the many famous numbers assigned her, she gives a ravishing performance of “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana”, the single well-known aria from Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally (1892). Westcott has a lighter mezzo ideally suited to her playfully seductive character. Lewis, an outright soprano, has the brightest voice of all which matches the eternally optimistic, Cherubino-like character she plays.

Chamber Pot Opera is one of those genial works that will please newcomers to opera as well as longtime opera aficionados. The piece has already been a hit at the Adelaide Fringe Festival and certainly deserves to be a hit at its upcoming run at the Edinburgh Fringe. I hope it will tour wherever spacious, well-appointed powder rooms can be found, because once you have seen it, you will certainly want to brings friends with you to see it again.

In Toronto we already know that the country’s largest opera company is not the only source of intelligent, delightful opera. Sydney’s bontom proves the same is true of Australia. The more exposure such inventive works get and the more opera is seen as not only the preserve of palaces of culture, the more widely the genre’s inherent appeal will be recognized. Thank you, bontom for this unforgettable musical glimpse inside a ladies’ powder room.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.bontom.com.au.

2017-06-15

Sydney, AUS: Chamber Pot Opera