Lily Einhorn
posted 25 October 2006

Shut your eyes. Imagine what a colour illustration of under-the-sea in a children's book would look like. Now open them. In front of you a huge carnivalesque green fish, all shiny fins and lightbulb eyes, bobs and sways across the stage. It swims between giant translucent green string curtains that shimmer and glow like gargantuan harp strings just waiting to be plucked; or grasping river weeds from a forgotten deep.

A man swims with the fish, suspended on a harness. He sings from beneath the water. Bubbles - white balloons held on strings by children - drift across him. Another man, an angel, is suspended on a rope ladder above the water, singing from the bank.

Take a deep breath. Look up. High above, nestled at the end of rows of seating, is the orchestra 'balcony', the conductor flinging his arms wildly towards the fish, jumping, gesticulating, not quite falling… Higher still the lights go on. A choir, dressed all in black, is illuminated, singing the sounds of the river. The balloons sway. The man swims. The fish glides. The orchestra plays. The man sings. The angel sings. The man fights. The fish fights. The fish is killed! The waters descend. The balloons drift away from the stage.

And then… A child in the audience starts to count, loudly and clearly - inexplicably - to six, and back again. A woman with Down's syndrome at the back of the stalls announces she may want to join in with the singing. Her carer tells her to go ahead. The angel and the man embrace.

This, then, is community opera.

Tobias and the Angel tells the Apocryphal story that starts with Tobit, who defies a law saying that he must not bury the murdered Jews, and is blinded by defecating birds. His son, Tobias, must travel to far away Ectabana, to recover a debt for his father. A stranger befriends him and guides him to the town. On the way they kill and dissect a fish, later to be used in freeing the beautiful Sara from the curse of killing her husbands as they sleep on her wedding night. And the story, as all good tales of loss and redemption should, ends happily, after a long journey.

Jonathan Dove's music and David Lan's words combine to from a suitably witty, down to earth, and downright inclusive, opera. The local children and adults, who make up the cast of over one hundred, are complemented by strong performances from a professional cast of 12, and a choir that swells the music to give it a beautifully ethereal quality in the midst of the stamping and the posturing and the dancing. The words are rhythmic and repetitive; 'In death is danger,' sings the river, 'In danger is death'; and witty, 'Not again', Sara suddenly wails as a seventh husband lands with a thud on her floor; 'Wed, bed, dead'. The music ducks and sways between heart stopping duets flung across the traverse stage to choral pieces with children, adults, and professional singers, to the traditional klezmer music of a good old Jewish wedding knees-up. What does not falter is that the performers are singing, and acting, their hearts out. The mothers' lament, 'We have so much sorrow,' sung from across a chasm of a big theatre and a long journey, is clear and strong, whilst the full bodied heart and soul of the chorus is a choral of foot stomping and shouting.

The two communities of Nineveh and Ectabana must come together in mutual aid and an admission of collective responsibility, just as the professional and amateur performers combine to make an exuberant and communal piece. The Young Vic's grand opening is a triumph of artistic and communal endeavour. Its seeming ideology of inclusivity without falling pray to the oft-repeated criticism of 'dumbing down'; its theatrical integrity that is uncompromised by that same inclusivity, must only be described as a joy. It does seem too obvious. But it works so well.

Run over.