Following his solo disquisitions on
Shakespeare and Dickens, Simon Callow turns his attention towards the
colossus of Bayreuth, as part of the Deloitte Ignite festival
celebrating the bicentenaries of Wagner and Verdi. Walking in full
auditorium lighting on to a stage whose clutter is vaguely intended to
symbolise that of Wagner’s mind, Callow begins chattily. Is this a
prologue, or the beginning of the show proper? After five minutes or so
the auditorium lights go down and the first of a handful of vaguely
arty video projections signals the commencement of the meat of the
matter.
This is not a performance comparable with Callow’s other solos; it puts
me in mind of nothing so much as the Royal Institution Christmas
Lectures, only instead of being interspersed with amusing experiments
conducted by the likes of Professor Heinz Wolff (oh, that dates me), we
get
Tannhäuser. For the core
fact is that Callow cannot perform these works as he can verbal ones:
the words of Shakespeare and Dickens he can enact, can bring to life
for us; the music of Wagner he can only describe as it is played, or
pretend to pick out a few chords on a piano whilst once again a
recording rolls. Curiously, although he emphasises the importance
Wagner himself placed on his own libretti, Callow never recites any
part of them.
What remains is a kind of evangelism, more at home in the studio space
at Covent Garden than it would have been in its originally intended
West End theatrical setting. It is informative, as it follows a simple
biographical trajectory; droll, describing for instance Wagner and his
second wife Cosima as being “of one mind – his” and summarising the
doctor’s certification of cause of death as that “Wagner died of being
Wagner”; and occasionally overplayed, as Callow throws one leg over the
arm of a wooden swivel chair and declares that Wagner’s passionate
preoccupation with renewing art means that “He’s Kurt Cobain, he’s
James Dean”. It is also candid about both the composer’s serial
infidelities and his fervent anti-Semitism, which flew in the face of
his own life experience. But in the course of its 100 or so minutes,
the piece never becomes any kind of artwork in its own right. It
remains discursive, not creative – a fine lecture, but no more than a
lecture.
Written for the Financial
Times.