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Welsh National Youth Opera 2008 :  Brian Irvine,  ‘The Calling of Maisy Day’ (Premiere)  Soloists, chorus and orchestra of Welsh National Youth Opera / Tim Rhys Evans (conductor) The Weston Studio, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff 11.7.2008 (BK)

Katy Treharne as Maisy

The excellent Welsh National Youth Opera has turned out two tremendous shows in recent years;  Bernstein's Candide in 2006 and Stravinsky's Rake's  Progress last summer, both done so well that their limited runs felt like short change for the energetic casts. As the annual high point in the award winning WNO Max scheme, these Youth Opera productions can be  particularly special: so cheers all round then to WNO for commissioning a new work to show off the young company's greatest assets - their exceptional team work, their extraordinary energy and their committed professionalism.

Having described the piece as 'Are Your Being Served?' on Acid', composer Brian Irvine and his librettist John Binias set the  story in a call centre, a typical place for young people to gather. It's meant to be fun for  performers and audience alike  and has a message of sorts about capitalist consumerism, in which buying and selling are all important regardless of their effects on customers and employees. Maisy Day manages the centre, part of a corporation called 'Virtual Veracity,' and is so successful that she is offered promotion to Head Office. Maisy sees herself as caring about her staff,  despite the centre's horrific working conditions, its peculiar team building rituals and the control that the  company has over the workers:  every response they make to  callers is scripted and their daily activities are tracked second by second, even their visits to the lavatory. But the company workers turn out to be vampires and when Maisy decides  to find out what their  jobs are really like by working incognito answering callers,  she is bitten by her colleagues and is vampirised herself. Think Wozzeck (especially WNO's 2005 version set in a baked bean canning factory - see review) by way of  Shaun of the Dead or The Rocky Horror Show and you'll be halfway to getting the drift.

Shona Pavett as Iliona
 

It's a decent enough idea but there are problems with the production, some caused by making the work  an ensemble piece for forty strong voices and a twelve instrument pseudo-rock band.  To come off as  both drama and fun, a plot-line like this needs wit and  humour to lighten  its otherwise bleak  message, with  impeccable diction from the singers to match. That's the thing that was  missing here and Brian Irvine's disco-sized music didn't help  communication much either.

Judging by the laughter from  people directly in front of particular singers, there were clearly some good jokes around in the text. Most  were lost on me though, simply because the words were mostly inaudible and without the plot synopsis, I'd have had some trouble sorting out  what was happening:  even with it, I'm still not sure what John Binias was driving at exactly.  Did the 'vampires' set up this dreadful system by themselves and if so, why did  they need  Maisy's help to get the job done? Or can people and vampires - like George Bush's fish - co-exist peacefully together? Perhaps most  'humans' these days are  vampires already, picking off everyone else  one by one,  until we're all  'consumed'  by pointless greed? There's no great fun in that though.

There's a real opera struggling to get out here and fitting it up with  surtitles would have helped it along a lot.  As it stands, Brian Irvine's deliberately zany music - full of telephone ring tones, snatches of themes from television commercials and show-style tunes -  is too remorselessly loud to match much of the action and the sheer volume of the singing makes the script unintelligible. The forty strong cast threw themselves into it wholeheartedly as always of course, whizzing on and off stage wheeling their work stations and headsets. There was some very enjoyable singing from Katy Treharne as Maisy and from Peter Horton as Simon, the two key call-centre characters. Aled Powys Williams sang very well too as Billy, the young man initially appalled by the call centre's  conditions, before fitting in like the other workers. Nice notion then, pity about the diction.

Bill Kenny

Photographs © Kirsten McTernan

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