The Intelligence Park review – brilliantly played but Barry's opera still bewilders

Linbury theatre, London
This witty production of Gerald Barry’s demanding opera about a composer with writer’s block features fine singing and playing

Gerald Barry is virtually a house composer at the Royal Opera House this season, with this Music Theatre Wales co-production acting as a prelude to the premiere staging of his Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in February. The Intelligence Park was the opera that announced his maverick credentials to the world nearly 30 years ago, and, if it was bewildering then, it’s scarcely less so now.

In the meantime, Barry’s style of writing for voices has become more of a known quantity, thanks especially to his 2010 opera of The Importance of Being Earnest. In that, and in Alice, Barry’s spiky, counterintuitive word setting, sending voices up into the stratosphere and down again into the depths in moments, and stressing syllables seemingly at random, tells a story much of the audience already knows. The Hogarth-style tale told in The Intelligence Park, set in 18th-century Dublin and involving a composer with writer’s block, an inheritance, a seduction and its consequences, is not a familiar playground in the same way – though opera fans may concede it’s exactly the kind of thing Haydn might have made a one-acter out of.

Barry’s music is led by Vincent Deane’s text, in that the orchestral lines often shadow the singer rhythmically. But, as the notes hit the ear like paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas, it’s so hard to hear the words that you usually end up reading them on the surtitles – and Deane’s wordy, allusive libretto, flirting with Joyce and Beckett, is no model of clarity itself.

Director and designer Nigel Lowery turns the Linbury stage into a replica of the composer Paradies’ toy theatre, with crudely drawn flats and with the characters like badly painted marionettes, bouncing around in cartoonish costumes. It’s witty, but this isn’t a comedy – at least, not in this production.

The cast does a fine job with some incredibly demanding music. Michel de Souza, announced as ill, perhaps lacked a few decibels but still convinced as the bemused Paradies, leaping between baritone and falsetto, and the rest were just as impressive. Jessica Cottis conducts with absolute security, and the London Sinfonietta plays brilliantly. But, if The Intelligence Park has great truths to tell, it keeps them well hidden.

• At the Linbury theatre, London, until 4 October, then touring.

Contributor

Erica Jeal

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Curiouser and curiouser: Thomas Adès on Gerald Barry's Wonderland
Gerald Barry’s new opera based on Alice in Wonderland is as breathless and surreal as Carroll’s novel. The conductor explains how Ode to Joy, a Russian Jabberwocky and wind machines all make perfect nonsense.

Thomas Adès

02, Feb, 2020 @3:00 PM

Article image
The week in classical: Agrippina; The Intelligence Park; The Greek Passion – review
Joyce DiDonato’s stop-at-nothing empress leads a top ensemble cast in Barrie Kosky’s enthralling Agrippina. Plus dizzying Gerald Barry and a powerful Martinů rarity

Fiona Maddocks

28, Sep, 2019 @10:59 AM

Article image
Bittersweet symphonies: UK classical music 2023 in review
Amid the funding woes there were still bright spots this year, from Bach to Byrd, and the Rite to Rachmaninov, while the streaming world continued to evolve and expand

Andrew Clements

14, Dec, 2023 @4:35 PM

Article image
The best classical music works of the 21st century
Over the coming week, the Guardian will select the greatest culture since 2000, carefully compiled by critics and editors. We begin with a countdown of defining classical music compositions, from X-rated opera to high-tech string quartets

Andrew Clements, Fiona Maddocks. John Lewis, Kate Molleson, Tom Service, Erica Jeal and Tim Ashley

12, Sep, 2019 @4:20 PM

Article image
Phaedra review – Henze's parable of death and renewal is fiery and sexy
Noa Naamat’s clutter-free production reveals the sparse beauty of Hans Werner Henze’s score, with fine singing and playing from the Jette Parker Young Artists and Southbank Sinfonia

Tim Ashley

16, May, 2019 @11:16 AM

Article image
Berenice review – witty and winning political chicanery
Handel’s collision of politics and love is played with conviction by a strong cast led by Claire Booth, under the direction of Adele Thomas

Erica Jeal

28, Mar, 2019 @11:52 AM

Article image
An explosive act of violence: why Britten’s Rape of Lucretia speaks to our brutal times
Britten’s opera is a strange, unsettling and unbearably private piece. Set in ancient Rome and written over 70 years ago, its theme is still all too contemporary, writes the director of a new production

Oliver Mears

11, Nov, 2022 @7:00 AM

Article image
Alice's Adventures Under Ground review – brilliant in every surreal detail
The dizzying world of Lewis Carroll is brought to wonderful and touching life, and Gerald Barry’s intense score is marshalled with panache by Thomas Adès

Andrew Clements

05, Feb, 2020 @12:35 PM

Article image
Alice's Adventures Under Ground review – Barry's breathless and brilliant raid on Lewis Carroll
Gerald Barry’s challenging and ingenious new opera was superbly delivered in concert by the Britten Sinfonia under Thomas Adès and a fine cast of singers

Andrew Clements

29, Nov, 2016 @3:21 PM

Article image
Macbeth review – musically formidable revival of Verdi's opera
Željko Lučić and Anna Netrebko give powerful performances and Phyllida Lloyd directs this imperfect yet intriguing revamp

Tim Ashley

27, Mar, 2018 @12:29 PM