Birmingham’s Big Tent

Birmingham’s city centre jags around the site where the manor house of the De Birmingham family once stood, though little now remains even of the great Smithfield livestock market that the 19th century threw down in its place. There’s a summer funfair there now, but in the second week of July the Birmingham Opera Company used the space to stage Michael Tippett’s radiant, hectic opera New Year. A few rides were already disputing the territory with the vast tent erected for the opera, but then Tippett’s drama is devoted to wrestling with the erratic, crammed juxtapositions of modern city life in a spirit of both relish and agony. I caught the exhilarating and rigorous production a week after polling day had falteringly swept Keir Starmer’s Labour to the conundrums of power.

New Year is a stunning conundrum, a late masterpiece so flamboyantly unmellow that it makes ripeness seem the harshest and most ragged state of all. Tippett had always mixed the impish and the magisterial, and in New Year – which had its premiere when he was 84 – he not only rages against the dying of the light but turns on every lurid or fluorescent light source that he can get hold of. It was written during the 1980s and the composer seems to have been watching Top of the Pops as keenly as the nightly news, and more gleefully.

The score incorporates passages of rap alongside its rampant excursions into experimental electronica and bursts of lyrical sweetness, and the sweeping, compacted freedom of the plotting – not to mention the dramatic vision – seems to owe much to the weird world of that decade’s pop videos. A richly conceptual and powerfully engineered preposterousness rules in Tippett’s opera as surely as it did in the best videos from Dire Straits or Madonna, and he blends an impetuous love of sheer aesthetic impact with humanitarian hauteur as headily as any stadium act.

The plot is all over the place. One group of characters is described as being from ‘somewhere and today’, and another set from ‘nowhere and tomorrow’. Jo Ann (Francesca Chiejina) is the heart of the first group and more or less the protagonist of the whole, a psychologist who withdraws from the horror at the disarray and violence surrounding her in a giddy urban wasteland called Terror Town, though the plight of her unruly foster brother Donny (Sakiwe Mkosana) and the concerns of their foster mother Nan (Sarah Pring) pull her back towards the world.

An image of Jo Ann’s careworn face is transmitted to the spaceship in which the second gang of characters is travelling through time and space, and they land in her neighbourhood on New Year’s Eve, a seething mix of communal conviviality and ritual violence. While a kind of romance develops between Jo Ann and Pelegrin (Joshua Stewart), the most personable of the three cosmic travellers, Donny more or less voluntarily becomes a scapegoat figure personifying the evils of the old year that need to be destroyed to give the new one a chance. He raps and street dances his way into a sort of sacred oblivion from which the opera impressively refuses to rescue him.

In some ways it refuses to rescue itself from the frantic, gaudy impact of these sequences towards the end of the second act. The greedy fits of sonic incorporation that rock through the whole of Tippett’s score become unhinged, as though he couldn’t be convinced by his own dramatic account of violence if it didn’t nearly take his music down with it. The swarming fluidity of the Birmingham company’s staging, as the main characters, dancers and choral singers shuttled between three stages through the promenade audience space, fed a genuinely unnerving sense that the piece’s feel for fragmentation would overwhelm its composer’s official doctrines of healing.

The interval in Birmingham fell between the second and third acts, which could have further unbalanced the evening but ended up dissolving the desire for resolution in favour of a new, frail sense of something more like departure. Rather than answering the terrifying questions posed by the first two acts, the third was more like a tenuous lyrical postlude, as a video message that Donny sends from the brink of the void gets caught up with the extended stately dance in which the spaceman and the psychologist enact their courtship. They are fated to separate in the end, but Jo Ann is sent back to her world determined to swallow its bitterness whole so that she can help it. The music has been showing her how to do so all along, and turning our ears, too, into engines for such metabolic feats.

Opera grew as an art over the 17th and 18th centuries out of the energies released as feudal or absolute courts confronted the coming world of modern cities. The country house opera festivals of the English musical summer may as well have been designed to wish away such difficult facts, but their productions end up either engaging with them after all or dying of boredom. Graham Vick developed the Birmingham Opera Company as a rebuttal not only of the blithe fare so often on offer at such venues, but also of the desperate, merely dramaturgical measures available to directors who want to stuff them with real life and real fervour.

The Birmingham company sees opera as a civic enterprise, committing itself to the feel of inner city spaces at their most porous. It has thought through the values of diversity and inclusion so fully and raucously that it’s possible to forget they have become bureaucratic jargon at all. As the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alpesh Chauhan, manoeuvred through the swerves and abrasions of Tippett’s score, throwing their tones into the big tent’s rambunctious and dirty acoustics, I couldn’t help feeling this was an even better venue for them than the city’s Symphony Hall in all its filigreed grandeur.

Tippett, the son of a suffragette, was an eccentric, bullish Trotskyist in the 1930s and served a brief prison sentence for pacifism during the Second World War. He took the call for ‘one humanity, one justice’ that ends New Year from something Mark Knopfler said at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert at Wembley in 1988. No one should pretend to be above slogans; the question is whether the available ones are good enough, and that will often depend on how fiercely they can be crammed with content. In New Year, ethical universalism loses its blandness and abstraction to become flamboyant, strenuous and bizarre.

Richly expansive though the orchestration can be, it more often breaks up into sometimes brusque, sometimes frenetic groups of instruments that refuse to blur the edges between its array of styles and genres. Keith Warner’s fabulous direction did not treat the big top as a homogenous empty space, but packed it with sharply imagistic passages or flashes of theatrical distinctness. A dance number featuring dazzling raincoats burst out of nowhere; Jo Ann’s house was a small stage of its own, encoding her seclusion; her dance with Pelegrin in the third act enfolded them in gauzy projections.

The decades following the defeat of fascism saw a second modernism flourish across Europe, leaner, more agile and more spacious than the first modernism, with its grandees and monuments. It’s visible in the liberating but meticulous revivals of mimesis in neorealist film or the Arte Povera movement in Italy; the stirring conflations of calculation and play by the Oulipo group in France; the simultaneously winnowed and billowing reversals of German romanticism in the writings of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. By the time of New Year, Tippett had moved defiantly on from the rapturous agonies with which his earlier work had tried to fuse its loyalty to pastoral lyricism with modernist experiment and stringency. He had done so, however, not by solving the conundrum or leaping ahead into one true style, but by giving up on fusion as a principle. Instead we get speed of thought, acceptance of breakage, versions of generosity and helpfulness that are all the more credible because they are inseparable from an appetite for change.

Birmingham has suffered disproportionately from the political failures and depredations of the last decades. Heady plans for new developments bestrewn with leisurely vistas and the shine of cultural regeneration are hovering over the site where Tippett’s opera resounded. Election night earlier this month was a flat sort of fever dream in which the country pretended that ritualistically punishing a dismal, haphazard government amounted to an agenda for political change.

New Year reminded me of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s great theatrical fantasia, in the way it pursues its themes of erotic and political desire by heedlessly crashing domestic, urban and cosmic spaces into one another. Both Kushner and Tippett have an immense, bizarre faith in the capacity of sheer performative potency to hold together the planes of action and thought that they set spinning, but neither work comes very close to resolving the rampant grandeur of its questions and clashes. Rather, the opera’s deepest lesson may be how many wastelands we are going to need to keep re-envisioning as sites or even founts of exuberant creativity.