Many years ago, I saw an American play that claimed to start with “a 20 minute interval”. At the well-packed Wellington Cathedral of St Paul, we started with a 10 minute rehearsal. Musical Director Michael Stewart affably informed the audience that they would be singing three sizeable bits of the performance and a few runs-through would be advisable.

[Photo by Dave Smith]

We rose to the challenge. It set the tone. Welcome to more community opera (hard on the heels of The Monster in the Maze, a Brent Stewart offering, as I recall).

Everyone knows the Noah story from the OT. God is displeased with the burgeoning number of earthly sinners. He purges the sinful Earth using a 40 days and 40 nights flood. Noah gets the honour of building an ark that will protect godly humanity and all breeds of animal until land, a dove and the rainbow of human happiness are firmly back in place.

Dipping into Middle English, the legendary Benjamin Britten crafts a very special opera to impart the tale; not as a dry intellectual exercise but one that thrusts the audience into the centre of the action and in communicating disbelief, despair, white knuckle fear and, finally, righteous and measured joy. Quite a shopping list in the ration of time available.

I’ve had a golden trot with Britten ever since, way back, I first saw Peter Grimes (second cousin to Noye) courtesy of Sadlers Wells. Not to mention War Requiem and, much later, The Turn of the Screw (NZ Opera).  Britten’s words are sober and find their mark but his music so often operates at a gut level. The seemingly ordinary is made eternally and, often frighteningly, memorable; haunting even.  

Earnest carpenter Noye (Robert Tucker) gets given some seemingly impossible dimensions to work to. He takes a bit of a verbal hammering from his wife (Maaike Christie-Beekman) and the local ‘gossips’ who, armed with milkshakes and popcorn, take up vantage points in the cathedral pulpit to watch Project Ark slip indecorously down the gurgler.     

The minimal nautical set offers strong support for the gurgler theory. A sail hangs perilously from the cathedral roof about 100 feet above. The superstructure of the ark comes in three standalone bits carried by small children. Yet all, eventually, is well.

Up through the centre aisle stride dozens of ebullient children lightly masked as animals. The organ (Tom Chatterton) booms out as does the clarion voice of God (Joshua Jamieson), barking out instructions. The mighty strains of the orchestra supply a cannonlike storm that sets the frail boat a-rocking. The audience pounds out its well-rehearsed support. At one point the shamelessly overloaded ark and its barely breathing contents set up a symbolic dissonance with the instruments; one that is both bafflingly listenable and fittingly symbolic of the titanic moral struggle we are witnessing/enduring.

The flimsy craft teeters on the edge of loud and mighty waves skilfully suggested by the frantic dominoing of the cast. A giant hanging gauze that separates the nave from the high altar maintains a developing picture of the heavens pitilessly fomenting the water. There is a welling up of contending sounds and visual motion that do their jobs extra well.  

The cast by then is sporting large transparent umbrellas and wearing sou’ westers. Between the moral and the physical storms I start to fell slightly queasy. We done everybody. That’s precisely what the audience is meant to feel.

Then suddenly Britten’s harsher musical strains become tempered with hope as the horizon is eagerly scanned and a dove (Ruby Millen) swoops along the aisle and up to the ark. The trial is over.

[Photo by Dave Smith]

And then. And then….. Britten has one more inspired shot in his locker. We are treated to a stellar performance of handbell ringing by girls of Samuel Marsden Collegiate School under Marian Campbell. These are not the frenzied peals of victory bells in the tradition of the 1812 Overture. Rather, we are treated to a judicious reassertion that human society and God are back in harmony. The Almighty is once again pleased by his people who have been submitted to severe trial and are not found wanting.

Overall, this is a very strong theatrical production inside the shell of a great church. The ever-surprising ability to raise us all up then to dash us all down in alternate waves of hope and despair are impressive. There is no villain other than God’s mighty ocean. The fight against it is convincingly brutal.

The voices, young and old, proved an inspiration. Noye and his wife ring out musically and true in whatever mood they arise. Young Alexander Stewart as Sem, William Edgecombe as Ham (like Noye and Mrs Noye) are junior models of controlled power and clarity.

To put something like this before the public in a building not designed for operatic theatre (though so stipulated by Britten himself) is mildly audacious. Jacqueline Coats has done it all so very well. At the finish, she pays handsome tribute to the production team at Audio Workshop that has harnessed so much young energy accompanied by a solo string quartet, a piano duet, violins, trumpets recorders and (utterly crucial) percussion.

A powerful army of lucid sound and vision that is wholly captivating and promises much for future years.  

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