A new opera venue and a new opera company. Three Mills Studios is a complex of East End industrial buildings alongside the River Lea, used now by the film industry. The cavernous performing spaces there have attracted the attention of the fledgling Clarion Music Theatre, whose inaugural show revives an early music-theatre piece by Harrison Birtwistle and Michael Nyman (who in an earlier incarnation was responsible for the text).
Down by the Greenwood Side, premiered in 1969, has not been staged in London in many years. It lasts a little over half an hour, requires four actors, a soprano, a mime and an instrumental ensemble, and was one of the products of that late 60s explosion of music-theatre in Britain, led by Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr and Birtwistle, which offered young composers a real theatrical alternative to writing full-blown operas at a time when opera houses in this country seemed only interested in looking backwards. Sparely scored and dramatically taut, this "dramatic pastoral" is very much a piece of its time, yet explores the perennial Birtwistle preoccupation with myths and the cyclic processes with which he draws them out.
Nyman's text, with its deceptively jokey surface full of surreal imagery and wordplay, interweaves two traditional English sources, a Mummers' play about St George and his battle with the Black Knight (aka Bold Slasher), and the Ballad of the Cruell Mother. The play is acted out to instrumental accompaniment, the ballad sung by the soprano as a series of refrains. The music (scored for the line-up listed in the Cornish Floral Dance) is alternately savage and rhapsodic, yet binds these two elements perfectly.
Musically the Clarion performance, with Lore Lixenberg excellent as the singer and an ensemble expertly conducted by Tim Murray, catches the flavour of the piece. But the staging, directed by Sarah V Chew, is by turns irritating and prosaic. Like much of Birtwistle's theatre Down by the Greenwood Side is intensely stylised, and it's not just my antipathy for audience participation that makes Chew's attempt to turn it into some adult pantomime seem misjudged - by breaking down the barrier between the audience and the performance and using naturalistic rather than puppet-like costumes, the ritual element of the piece is destroyed. Chances to see this curious work are rare, though if you go, take your thermals.
Continues tonight, tomorrow and Sunday. Box office: 0171-602 5707
