Scottish Opera: Trial by Jury / A Matter of Misconduct!
Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Not so very long ago, the activities of Scottish Opera were siloed so that the most a young musician recruited to the Emerging Artist programme might expect beyond the perennial four-singers-and-a-piano touring show was a step-out role from the chorus in a mainstage production.
Perhaps hastened by the strictures of the pandemic, that is no longer the case, and this double-bill, which goes on to play the summer season of London’s Opera Holland Park after its Glasgow and Edinburgh dates, gives the current cohort of young singers an excellent opportunity to strut their stuff.
The pathway is clearest in the world premiere after the interval, because composer Toby Hession – who also conducts the whole evening – and librettist Emma Jenkins honed their partnership for those Opera Highlights tours. Their shorter pieces, Told By An Idiot and In Flagrante, were the best of an initiative to include new works, and the latter was very much a stepping stone to A Matter of Misconduct!
Sharing more than an exclamation mark with Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London!, the pair’s interest in creating contemporary comic opera is nonetheless a far from over-populated field, and A Matter of Misconduct! pulls no punches in getting its laughs. The explicit vocabulary in Jenkins’ text is rare on the opera stage, and in baritone Ross Cumming, as ambitious MP Roger Penistone, they have a singer whose performance skills are already well-established.
The scandal that threatens his Parliamentary progress involves his wife Cherry (mezzo Chloe Harris) and her own ambitions to be a wellness guru, and their “allies” in trying to bury it are press secretary Hugo Cheeseman (bass-baritone Edward Jowle), lawyer Sylvia Lawless (soprano Kiri Kaplan) and special advisor Sandy Hogg (tenor Jamie MacDougall). Filled with barbs at both Westminster and Holyrood (a motorhome predictably figures), the script is confident enough of its terrain to make a serious point at the end and Hession’s score is as assured, with particularly good, and challenging, arias for Kaplan and MacDougall and a memorable duet for Harris and Cumming.
It says a great deal for the new piece, directed by Laura Attridge, that it can follow a brilliant revival of Gilbert & Sullivan’s first hit, marking the work’s 150th anniversary. John Savournin’s Trial by Jury is set in a 1980s television studio and Jowle, as studio floor manager rather than court usher, sets the scene before a note of music is heard.
The directorial device works a treat, and the young cast have MacDougall as Edwin, the Defendant, and veteran G&S man Richard Suart as the Judge leading the way with the campest performances. Even they are outdone by the Bridesmaids, brilliantly choreographed by Kally Lloyd-Jones, fronting a chorus in fine voice (as is the smaller one in A Matter of Misconduct!).
Whether from 40 years ago, or just a few months ago, the cultural references in both shows are absolutely spot on, and the singing onstage and playing from the pit as precise. The fact that these shows, alongside The Merry Widow, are going to London in their entirety, orchestra, chorus and all, should be a matter of no small Scottish pride.
Keith Bruce
Production shot of A Matter of Misconduct! by Mhaela Bodlovic