The Moderate Soprano

by David Hare

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 26 April 2018

Jeremy Herrin directs Roger Allam as Captain John Christie and Nancy Carroll as his wife Audrey Mildmay in this play about the foundation of the Glyndebourne opera festival, with Paul Jesson as Dr Fritz Busch, Anthony Calf as professor Carl Ebert, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Rudolf Bing and Jade Williams as Jane Smith. The production is designed by Bob Crowley; it is a West End transfer of a play originally seen in Hampstead in 2015.

Although most of the characters speak straight to the audience at times (during scene changes) recollecting events of significance, the bulk of the play concentrates on Captain John Christie's determination in 1934 to build an opera house on his Sussex estate and to create an annual festival there in which his wife, a 'moderate' soprano, can shine. He employs three notable German refugees who are both baffled by Christie's ambition and eventually determined to make the festival work - even at the cost of weaning him from his desire to stage Parsifal in order to perform the more suitable repertoire of Mozart. This fascinating story is punctuated with several short scenes showing Audrey's fatal illness after the Second World War, with postscript of Christie's declining years as a widower.

The play wisely avoids any attempt to represent the actual Glyndebourne seasons of the 1930s. Instead, in the first half we are presented with a great deal of historical scene-setting in the accounts given by the three Germans of their experiences in the first months of the Nazi regime. This is no mere exposition, since David Hare sets most of these accounts in the context of Christie's initial approach to Fritz Busch and in the early days of their residences in Glyndebourne itself, where Audrey's instinctive tact subtly works to offset the bluntness of her husband's reactions to his somewhat prickly guests. So we are not only reminded of these devastating events, but we also begin to understand the dynamics of the Christie marriage and the genuineness of John Christie's plans. Furthermore, we can hardly escape the resonances with the current climate of hostility to refugees and immigrants in the UK.

In the second half the focus is on the preparation for the first season, in which Christie's vision finally has to reckon with the bald limitations of the auditorium he has built and the practicalities of mounting an opera production. Once again Audrey manages to avert the impending collision of egos, at the remarkable cost of agreeing to audition for a role that her husband had simply assumed that she would have as of right. By these means she softens the implacable views of the Germans while forcing John Christie to interpret her willingness to audition not as a concession or a weakness, but as a vindication of the artistic control that he must allow his experts to wield. The cost to her own self-esteem is high, but she rarely lets it show.

Roger Allam and Nancy Carroll are excellent in their roles, he abrasive and determined, she a far more subtle wielder of power. The love between them is a bedrock which is conveyed mostly by understatement, but it finds deeply moving expression in the last scene of Audrey's illness as she lies blind and in pain and insists that John recite to her in order all the operas performed in the pre-war seasons. His increasing desperation in recalling these (for the umpteenth time, one assumes) shows how devastated he will be at her death. Behind the comedy of social attitudes (his insistence that the audiences should not be able to regard coming to his house as mere evening entertainment after a day's work) and the appalled awareness of the growing clouds in Europe lies a fascinating story of artistic endeavour and a rich personal connection between husband and wife. The play reveals all this marvellously well.