Confined Human Condition at Tron, Glasgow **
Cathie Boyd’s Theatre Cryptic deals in “music to be seen, not just listened to”, but despite Boyd’s ability to hunt out interesting musical collaborations, these two monologues showed just how tricky it is to get the balance right.
Alejandro Viñao’s Baghdad Monologue is a pulsing, abrasive electronic work full of percussive syntax about a Baghdad woman grieving for her dead child while commenting on the Allied invasion. The soprano Frances M. Lynch did sterling work maintaining 30 minutes of intensive soliloquy, but in a disjointed, rather clumsy, insistently repetitive libretto by the composer, the harsh, hectoring style of the spoken word grated. Boyd’s jerky staging was too distancing, although those moments when a stilled, visible Lynch called out to her son were moving.
In the second work the composer Phillip Neil Martin, a previous Cryptic collaborator, took on Saint Teresa of Avila, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and The Pillow Book in Terror of Love, a 45-minute premiere for voice and electronics that explored “a lady’s spiritual awakening through her perverse manifestations of ecstasy and love, sustaining the denial of her physical limitations at the moment of death”. The effect was rather awkward in the (rather copious) flesh.
The allusions were age-old, and just a little tired — religion and sex, death and sex, sex and religion — as the basqued-up mezzo Loré Lixenberg lay on her daybed of crimson joy surrounded by apples placed higgledy-piggledy by the audience.
The apples were for Saint Teresa and original sin, presumably, but the problem was not just in the rather dominant staging: a mirrored boudoir pitting Lixenberg against an art school graduate, Clare Roderick, who slowly stripped out of her sparkly gimp suit. In a multi-layered sonic mesh with Tibetan singing bowls, the breathily pre-recorded words, sung moments later by Lixenberg, were frequently inaudible. The one- dimensional scenario seemed to say little more than “woman thinking about sex in boudoir”. This might be music to be seen, but what’s the point if you can’t hear it?
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