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Small in scale yet ambitious in its intended impact: the description fits the Spitalfields music festival as much as it does Cover Her, one of two new music-theatre works that this year that took audiences into two of east London’s black-box performance spaces.
Composed by Litha Efthymiou and staged at Rich Mix in Shoreditch, Cover Her juxtaposed two stories: of the 3rd-century Christian martyr St Eulalia, and of a woman today testifying against the man who abused her 30 years earlier. Eulalia was represented by the urgent, fluid dancing of Harriet Parker-Beldeau and by the soprano Keren Motseri, who sang her story as described in a contemporary Latin poem. Actor, director and scriptwriter Jenny Ayres played the modern woman.
Speech, song, dance and an instrumental score for percussion, cello and harp were melded together inseparably. At times Parker-Beldeau’s arm gestures were mirrored by everyone on stage, even the instrumentalists – which created visual unity and a sense of ritual. Efthymiou’s music, too, initially had a forbidding ritual solemnity thanks to the bells and dangerously crescendoing tam-tam underpinning Motseri’s chant-like introduction. Later, much use was made of the solo cello, with an exaggeratedly wide vibrato used as an effect, and of eruptions of glittery, chiming percussion and harp. Parker-Beldeau’s movements worked as one with the music to suggest the torture scene unsettlingly vividly. Then, at the end, wrapped in a white chiffon shroud and holding lights in her hand, she was transformed into the very vision of a plaster saint. Meanwhile, in between Eulalia’s episodes, Ayres built up the modern woman’s testimony from one-word answers into, finally, a kind of “I have a dream” speech.
So here were two powerful stories of 13-year-old girls, put in impossible situations by the men in power around them – but other parallels were left open to interpretation. Ultimately the stories’ combination felt just too arbitrary, however tightly woven in performance.
Scenes from Under Milk Wood, performed at Metronome in Whitechapel, was a less ambitious undertaking, with Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade’s music lightly underlining a trimmed-down version of Dylan Thomas’s radio play – mostly spoken but partly sung. Played by the six-strong Nova Music Ensemble conducted by George Vass, with distinctive touches for harp and vibraphone, the music reinforced the vibrant, chattering musical rhythms of Thomas’s lines without unduly hogging focus. More could perhaps have been done with the staging: an illuminated red sign suggested a recording studio, and the hairstyles and outfits of the four singers suggested the 1950s, but with everyone squeezed behind music stands that’s about as far as it went.
David Prince’s narration, read from the page, didn’t have quite the authority that Thomas’s all-seeing eye ideally needs, but the four singing actors brought their many characters to colourful life, with Rebecca Afonwy-Jones standing out first as the unhinged Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, then as Polly Garter, singing a bittersweet lament.
