The Measurable Maturity Of The QFT

The Measurable Maturity of the QFT: Mastersingers and Cherry Orchard George Fleeton Under the direction of Susan Picken, the Queen’ Film Theatre Belfast, our most independent-minded cinema, has matured measurably in the last three years. A new association with whiskey probably helps, but need a sponsor take up 12.5% of the available space in the QFT’s excellent bimestrial programme guide? Newly released art house, niche audience films are still the staple diet, their only outlet anywhere in N. Ireland. Mainstream Hollywood does feature, and in its best guise too, namely reissued classics, such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Big Sleep, The African Queen and Taxi Driver – all of which I have had the privilege so far this year of introducing on opening nights. (Next up, by the way, is Gilda on July 29^th at 6.40pm). But it is in Susan’s considered steps in scheduling live theatre and live opera as special events that the real measure of QFT maturity is to be found, not to mention outreach initiatives with the Ormeau Baths Gallery and the Ulster Museum. It has to be accepted that a relatively small two screen cinema such as the QFT is unable to screen the wondrously successful Met: Live in HD operas fed in directly from New York on select Saturday nights. That, we hope, might remain the speciality of the Odyssey Cinemas on Queen’s Quay, where the first of eleven live Metropolitan Operas, in a sixth season, are due back, starting from October 15^th and continuing until April 14^th. One wonders out loud though why Michael McAdam, proprietor-extraordinaire of the Movie House cinema chain (with three locations in greater Belfast, plus Maghera and Coleraine) doesn’t give the Met Operas serious consideration, because the general ambience at any one of his complexes on a Saturday night is bound to be less harsh, brash and soulless than that to be found at the Odyssey multiplex. At the QFT meanwhile what really rattles and hums are three operas from the current season at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in East Sussex, and a string of plays, of more variable efficacy it has to be said, live from the National Theatre in London. On June 26^th we had a relay of Wagner’s most accessible opera of the thirteen that he composed, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, first staged in Munich in 1868. This was a six hour marathon, including intervals, and this production of this most friendly of Wagner’s operas – and ironically the one to start with if you are new to the complexities of the German maestro – burned so slowly that you felt every hour passing, sometimes leadenly. As someone remarked, at the curtain: ‘bum-numbing’. Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley carried the weight of this huge opera on most capable shoulders, in the pivotal role of noble Hans Sachs, a verifiably historic cobbler and mastersinger, going through his mid-life crisis, all things to all men and women, yet probably no better off personally at the finish than he was at the beginning. (In my view Sachs’ final scene – a chauvinistic party political on behalf of purity in glorious German art, as in ‘don’t let any foreign stuff foul it up, keep out the wops and the frogs’– should today be cut from any and all productions or recordings of this work. Not nice.) QFT’s short Glyndebourne season continues on July 31^st (at 6pm) with Mozart’s 1787 opera Don Giovanni. This is a recording from last year. These QFT specials conclude on August 21^st (again at 6pm) with Benjamin Britten’s chamber piece The Turn of the Screw (1954), which first saw the light of day at La Fenice in Venice, having been commissioned there by the Biennale. In this live production, Belfast-born soprano Giselle Allen sings the role of the former governess, Miss Jessel. Then on June 30^th, there was the live feed to the QFT from the National Theatre of Anton Chekhov’s last play The Cherry Orchard, premiered in 1904, at the Moscow Art Theatre, less than six months before his death, aged 44. More notable perhaps for his brilliant short stories,  all of Chekhov’s extended dramas still resonate mightily in world theatre today: The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. What unites these plays is their unflinching portrait, in four discrete symphonic movements, of the stagnant, helpless quality of life of the land owning class in Russian society in the years before revolution. Was Chekhov criticising the backwardness he saw, in social and political life in Russia under the czars, as a medical practitioner and observant writer of humorous sketches in popular newspapers? Did he disguise his critique of what he saw in a dramatic blend of poetic atmosphere, at times palpably gloomy and pessimistic, taken with sympathetic treatment of characters trapped in unfulfilling lives? Whatever about getting it past the Okhrana security police of Nicholas Romanov, audiences then (and now) embraced these dramas as significant commentary and excellent story-telling, helping them to see themselves and to see how others saw them. In the production of The Cherry Orchard under review, a cast of decent, sensitive but self-deluding characters, led by actors Zoë Wanamaker and Ballycastle’s own Conleth Hill, dream of improving their lives but fail, victims of their own senseless dreams, living  in a fatal denial that (to paraphrase Yeats’ reflection on the Easter Rising of 1916) all would change, change utterly, and terrible beauties would be born – in Russia the following year (1905), but most importantly in the October 1917 of the Bolsheviks. In presenting Mastersingers and Cherry Orchard, the QFT is proving it can cope with its own mid-life crises (it was born in 1968) by offering Wagner and Chekhov to discerning and perhaps parallel audiences, who would have  lesser degrees of interest in the more regular fodder of sub-titled, foreign language movies from sometimes obscure national film cultures. Whiskey might help, short term. But it will never be food for the soul like great German music and perceptive Russian drama. George Fleeton teaches Opera and Cinema in Higher Education. His autumn 2011 courses will include: The Silent Cinema and Opera for the Terr!f!ed at Stranmillis University College from September 20^th, and Callas-la diva divina and Best Adapted Screenplays in QUB from September 26^th. He will also be reporting for www.downnews.co.uk from the 68^th Venice Film Festival (August 31st-September 10th and from the 60^th Wexford Festival Opera (October 21^st-November 5^th). www.queensfilmtheatre.com www.odysseycinemas.co.uk www.moviehouse.co.uk www.glyndebourne.com www.nationaltheatre.org.uk www.labiennale.org www.wexfordopera.com]]>