Oedipe (ROH, 23 May)

Opera's hit-or-miss ratio--minute-to-minute, and production-by-production--is higher than any other art form that I know of. When it works, and all of the parts of a production come together, it can be amazing; often, though, operas feel like a whole bunch of stagey bits sort of orbiting each other without interacting meaningfully. This, coupled with the genre's tendency towards being pokey, makes for some boring nights out--I don't know what it would take to experience pure pleasure at an entire season's worth of opera, but that substance probably isn't legal.
Oedipe at the Royal Opera tonight was one of those amazing experiences where everything really does come together--singing, staging, score, costumes. In fact this is maybe the most purely dramatically effective staging of an opera I've ever seen. La Fura dels Baus, the company who designed this opera, simply made a series of luminous, intelligent staging choices, never setting a foot wrong. The acts of the opera each had a distinct aesthetic: the first like a medieval painting or bas-relief sculpture; the second a sort of 1920s interior, with Oedipus (wonderfully) on the couch, his mother as analyst. The Phocis scene, where Oedipus kills his father, was set on a contemporary highway, with flickering signs counter pointing the murder. Indeed even the fight scenes worked, which is to say looked like a decent contemporary stage setting of a fight; I can close my eyes and remember Oedipus with his shovel. The scenes in plague-ridden Thebes recalled J-Horror films. For once this wasn't just what-the-hell eclecticism, but--it seemed to me--an attempt to do something with the universality of the Oedipus story. I even liked the giant airplane--last season's giant fish, you are forgiven.
Lord, even the plot and lyrics were genuinely intriguing, these not always (shall we say) opera high points. I think particularly of a dying girl in the plague being told "soon you will be ash," as poetic a moment of horror as I have recently seen on stage; and of the intelligent existentialist reframing of the whole Oedipus story, with a rejiggered Sphinx question and a new ending.
Nothing makes me feel stupider than talking about music--anyone with any background in musical theory should probably go back to Playing Clash of Clans. But I will say that the score was perfectly matched to the story it was telling: mysterious and dread-laden (there's that advanced critical vocabulary) when necessary, breaking off into lovely textures to dramatize thought and inquiry, and suitably melodic to offer a fanfare resolving everything and send the punters home happy.  Indeed this is an Oedipus story with a happy ending, with Oedipus as a figure for human experience and endurance.
Again, opera-going often feels like an exercise in compromises: we put up with most things not working (somnolent pacing, pointless repetition, someone's decision to stage "Salome" in the toilets) because, every few minutes, the elements of what opera presents line up and we really do have moments of what Wagner called for: total drama. And last night the 7s kept lining up, over and over again. My £6 Upper Slips ticket might have been the best theatrical value in London last night.