Triptych, Opera Erratica

Innovative venue The Print Room brings multi-media opera to West London

You might expect an experimental opera to be a bit of a tortuous experience, but not in the leafy, sweet-strewn setting of the Print Room. Triptych, the new production from Opera Erratica, manages to hold its audience conscientiously to attention offering a mixture of tragic opera and musical farce.

The Ideas

Basing its structure very loosely on Puccini's Il Trittico , Triptych brings together three short operas: a tragedy, a comedy and a piece about nuns. In spite of the opera's interest in connections between people, director Richard Eakin Young steers clear of obvious references to social media, preferring a visual feast of black and white photography, film and vinyl.

The recurrent theme of authorship plays out in the use of old recordings, letters and interviews, played alongside the singing or mimicked as libretto. Film of the singers performing in realtime is played at angles to the living counterparts, placing the singing in a collage of media that is strikingly a-classical.

If you're into Gavin Turk - a renowned Young British Artist - then you will marvel at the set, Turk's first theatre commission, which features a number of his most celebrated works, replicated in a new form by the artist in a 'fake' exhibition. 

Three Scenes

The show may be highbrow at times but it certainly doesn't get in the way of enjoyment. Using a hashed-up recording of an old-fashioned English lesson, the comedy opera re-appropriates the recording - sped up, rewound, broken up and repeated - as a script. The piece delights in the messiness of this taking apart, and instead of leaving the audience with chaos, puts together the disparate phrases to produce a raucously quick-witted party scene that degenerates joyfully into an orgy. The ringing laughter of the audience was just praise for a hilarious, and technically startling, piece of theatre.

The tragedy is a humane attempt to uncover the story of architectural photographer Richard Nickel from the shadow of his subject, Louis Sullivan, whose works Nickel wanted to record before they were demolished in sixties Chicago. The tale of Nickel's disappearance is retold with plenty of drama. 

And don’t let the nuns frighten you off. With simultaneous film, audio and live performance, this could be the most inaccessible of the operas, but stick with it - the pace is sure to quicken later on.