Composers have written songs without words, so why not opera without words? From one angle, that is how John Woolrich's new piece Bitter Fruit could be viewed. It is a three-act stage work, with a continuous musical score, lasting longer than Berg's Wozzeck and most of Janacek's operas; but apart from a few sexual grunts and groans at the final climax (two couples caught grotesquely in the act), the characters remain completely silent.
But Woolrich's score does not simply mime opera: there is little instrumental "singing" in the conventional sense. It mixes Birtwistle-like angry expressionism with the weird, mechanical-toy style Woolrich has made his own. And yet there is pathos: the violent, sad fairy tale of the gifted, Caliban-like Feast (a reworking of the Greek Hephaestus myth), alternately rejected and duped by his cruel aristocratic parents, invites our pity - the emotion acutely but unsentimentally underlined by the music.
Woolrich's invention never flags. It was no surprise to discover that the score came first, and that Trestle Theatre Company's Toby Wilsher designed both the story and the production to fit what Woolrich had already written. On the whole, action and music work very effectively together. The only problems relate not to the fairy-tale plot, but to the sub-plot. Bitter Fruit is a masque, with the characters played by the Greek gods. We sense that all is not well behind the scenes - rivalries, resentments, a complicated web of desire and frustration. But it is as hard to follow these as it is easy to chart the central drama. Toby Wilsher may have seen this as a virtue: leave the audience to work out what the back-stage shenanigans mean. But often this peripheral business is just confusing. And when, at the end, the masks are dropped and the gods' private drama spills on to the stage, it is hard to make out who exactly is doing what, to whom, and why. Woolrich builds the final revenge climax splendidly; but at the high point, Wilsher pulls the rug out from under his feet.
But until that final parting of the ways, Bitter Fruit makes a compelling and very entertaining music-theatrical fable. Trestle Theatre brought the action to life vividly, and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, under its director Thomas Adès, did the same and more for Woolrich's music - it is rare to hear a first performance that sounds so assured and enthusiastic. But those are the qualities we are learning to expect from BCMG.
