Benjamin Britten
Slung Low & Manchester Collective
Depot Mayfield, Manchester
July 9, 2023; 60 mins
As the sun shines through the graffitied railway arches and between spells of thunderous rain, in a week of weather that saw water coming through my kitchen ceiling, I make my way, appropriately, to Depot Mayfield for Noah’s Flood, part of the Manchester International Festival.
In the huge, dark warehouse buzzing with hundreds of performers and audience members on this particular Sunday afternoon, this is a truly magical space.
Britten’s Noah's Flood is a one-act opera first performed at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1958, and created for a cast and orchestra of professionals, children and community, designed for "churches and large halls, but not for theatres", and based on a medieval Chester Mystery Play.
It's in Middle English, variously tricky to perform and sometimes to understand, but for which our host and the (spoken) voice of God – Lemn Sissay – explains, we might assume a strong Wigan accent. Indeed, I find that I would very much like God to look and sound like Lemn Sissay, dressed in a white suit, embellished with a huge rainbow. (It is, of course, no coincidence that the rainbow might mean more to today’s Manchester audience than perhaps it did in Aldeburgh the 1950s, though one imagines that Britten might be thoroughly on board.)
This production, expertly directed by Alan Lane and inclusively conducted by Nicholas Chalmers, was seen earlier this week in Leeds, and is a collaboration between the two innovators: Manchester Collective, and the socially conscious Slung Low theatre company, and indeed cost of living and the need for social cohesion is mentioned in the introduction. It is a celebration of social togetherness and an almost impossibly organised quality performance, with an unimaginable number of moving parts. The MC website bills it as "Joyful, uplifting, handmade".
With 200 performers, including 180 local primary school children expertly dressed as all the animals, in beautiful costumes by Heledd Rees (the incandescent jellyfish particularly incredible), this project, quite simply is why publicly-funded arts do, and must, exist.
The audience, with hymn sheets, are also expected to sing at three points. And sing we did. Sissay reminded us emotively of the time we couldn’t sit or sing together, of our own British tradition of singing our hearts out on a Sunday, and invited us to let the commuters a half-mile away on Picadilly Station know we were here. Thus spoke the voice of God.
The blend of community musicians and the professionals never once jarred. The association of recorder players and singing children, and the fanfares of community brass players reminiscent of Remembrance Sunday, were rich and warmly felt. If Noah (Morgan Pearce) served on occasion to keep God in rhythm, it was a joyful reminder that, as Sissay had told us, it was the first opera most of the children had performed, and he was in that same boat with them.
Here is the strength of the framework originated by Britten and re-created for this production. Within such a structure there is room for the medieval and the contemporary; the elite and the playful, the professional polish and the home-made. Alongside the vocal excellence of Pearce as Noah and Heather Low as his wife, children with training sang substantial roles very well, and Ingram Road Primary School – every child mentioned by name on the MC website – offered a mesmerising spectacle as the exhaustive pairs of beasts. A special mention, for the best wave of the afternoon in the final procession, goes to the larger rhino...
Of course the piece is already a patchwork, with Mystery Play references to Christ and the Saints within an Old Testament story, with Middle English smoothed into an understandable and performable form, and here with amplification of children’s voices never hidden, remembering that this is not an anathema for an opera orginally performed at a festival, but also commissioned and performed for 1950s television.
It’s a palimpsest, in which we find the theatre and messages relevant to our times wrapped in the world of Britten, harking back to a line of earlier traditions. In an age in which the Arts Council prioritises community participation, we might remember where this all began.
And in the apocalyptic story of Noah, performed in a week of torrential storms, might we find a warning for our own world – albeit mediated by the joy and hope of an opera performed by an entire community.