It’s been quite a year for Mark-Anthony Turnage, with the widely acclaimed premiere of Festen at the Royal Opera House, and now the premiere of another opera, The Railway Children, his first work for Glyndebourne. Festen adapted a 1990s Danish film, it is also as a film (from 1970, directed by Lionel Jeffries) that the current story will be best known by audiences and with which they will probably compare this new version. The source for both that film and the opera is the novel of 1906 by Edith Nesbit (once resident not very far away from Glyndebourne, in Sussex, and also buried quite close, in Romney Marsh).
The film captured the book’s Edwardian ethos, but Turnage and Hewer’s adaptation, directed by Stephen Langridge, brings to the fore the theme of espionage and so turns it into something more of a spy thriller, set in the 1980s. The Russian stranger who appears at the station (Mr Tarpolski) suffers the effects of an attempted assassination by contact with the poisoned point of an umbrella, evidently in reference to the death of Georgi Markov in London at the height of the Cold War. It’s later explained that Tarpolski was framed by the Soviet government for espionage, just as the children’s father, David (called ‘Daddy’ throughout) was falsely implicated in diplomatic treachery but eventually cleared. The figure of Yolanda is invented, ostensibly Cathy’s (the mother) friend and assistant, though eventually revealed to be a treacherous informer herself. These two characters aren’t much developed and so Bethany Horak-Hallett and Rachael Lloyd’s performances don’t pass for much – solid, but anonymous.
Instead, the opera focuses on the children and how they navigate the adults’ world – about which they know somewhat more than their more innocent counterparts in the original – with characteristic and charming playfulness, as well as poignant anxiety. To underline the point, they (and Mr Perks) often address the audience directly, narrating their story. Although Turnage says that he didn’t write the opera for children, as a work about them that’s also rewarding for adults with or without families like his previous opera Coraline, it’s perhaps not a coincidence that there are correspondences with Hänsel and Gretel, the most-famous opera also about children. In both works the youngsters fantasise about the food they would like to eat; and it is the father who is the more strikingly sympathetic parent, even if the mother is merely more distant from her offspring rather than quite so bad-tempered as Humperdinck’s. The performances convincingly bring engaging cheer and teenage antics, with delectable mischief by Henna Mun’s Phyllis, but also some heart-searching anxiety by Jessica Cale’s Bobbie (Jenny Agutter in the film) in two monologues in Act Two. Matthew McKinney has something of the indifferent, resentful demeanour of a teenage boy, if perhaps with too great a touch of adult gruffness in his voice.
Despite period detail, the overall style of the production isn’t entirely one of filmic realism. The action takes place partly in front of a black screen, while the main episodes play out in small cells upon which the screen opens and closes like the aperture of a camera, creating the impression that we are viewing those scenes as though on TV or at the cinema. As each set evidently rolls off the stage, to be replaced by another, there is also an implied sense that we are looking in on the carriages of a train in sequence. Locomotives – at the centre of this drama – are only alluded to in lighting effects and silhouettes, though the front engine of one in black relief grinds to a halt in the startling incident when the children successfully wave it down to avoid collision with a landslide. Perhaps in deference to the other famous railway film, Brief Encounter, partly shot at Carnforth station, the opera sets the action in the same county of Lancashire, with Mr Perks (Bernard Cribbins’s character originally) and Sir Tommy Crawshaw (formerly the Old Gentleman, now a retired football celebrity) given appropriate accents by Gavan Rang and James Cleverton respectively. They each turn in friendly, whimsical performances without upstaging the central focus on the children. Edward Hawkins stirs compassion for the Russian émigré Tarpolski, and more matter of fact in his brief guise as David.
Turnage’s chugging score is well crafted for a work in which railways are to the fore, starting with the imitation of a horn blast as a call to attention. The score’s jazzy harmonies and rhythms evoke a certain forward direction and purpose, and the efficient, singable word-setting makes the text accessible, although overall the music doesn’t quite become memorable. There’s a deeper strain of melancholy in the second Act, which opens with Bobbie’s sorrowful monologue on learning of her father’s imprisonment. If her reconciliation with him at the end is somewhat anti-climactic and sentimental, the musical setting carries more emotional force in that the falling two-note motif on “Daddy” transmutes and exonerates the same pregnant tones to which iterations of “guilty” were sung in her earlier monologue and previously in Act One, recurring like a nagging thought. A chorus for those assembled at a ceremony for the reopening of a nearby railway bridge in honour of the children’s bravery discussing the unsuitability of various colours is oddly misplaced like some frivolous number from a musical. Making his Glyndebourne debut, Tim Anderson paces the music well, the Glyndebourne Sinfonia integrating the different stylistic influences on the score into a coherent whole. The opera successfully captures the combination of seriousness and light-heartedness of the novel and film; but as a thriller it could perhaps have risked more extreme dramatic contrasts.
Further performance as a staged concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on November 8
