tumbling through their own sentences
by
Douglas Messerli
Nicholas
Wright (libretto), Nico Muhly (composer) Marnie
/ Metropolitan Opera live-in-HD transmission, Saturday, November 10, 2018
I
should begin this essay by admitting that I never much liked Alfred Hitchcock’s
1964 film Marnie, mostly because of
its hack psychological story, as retooled from Winston Graham’s 1961 novel by
screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. I have never much liked her film-writing and
doctoring, including works such as The
Prime of Miss Brodie, Travels with My Aunt, Forty Carats, Cabaret, Funny Lady and
other box-office successes. What she basically does is take important novels and
plays and “re-fix” in ways that exaggerate their characters, Liza Minelli’s
portrayal of Sally Bowles in Cabaret
being a perfect example (she complained that director-choreographer Bob Fosse
didn’t much like the Bowles figure, and if you properly read the Isherwood
book, why should you?) Although she was known as someone who might re-write and
improve works, I think she often turned them into glossier versions of what
were actually darker pieces of writing, and Marnie,
in particular, seemed like a film, under Hitchcock’s handling, about a tortured
psychotic whose problems were simply explained away with a childhood incident
in which, seeing her prostitute mother being attacked by a sailor, she took up
a fireplace poker and clubbed the intruder to death, the sudden remembrance of
which frees her to remain with her husband, Mark Rutland, as her protector
instead of facing jail time for her numerous acts of robbery in her past.
I attended the new Metropolitan opera live-HD
production yesterday, accordingly, with some consternation and a great many
doubts. Although Muhly and his librettist Nicholas Wright immediately embraced
the idea of turning Graham’s novel into an opera, I still feel it’s a highly
confused and second-rate work. Even if we discover the heart of Marnie’s
problems are quite different from the movie, it doesn’t still quite explain her
hatred of all men and her insistence upon robbing them and turning much of her
evil gain over to her detestable mother (a bad woman through and through as
even her performer Denyce Graves admitted in an intermission interview). But,
at least, in refocusing on the novel, Muhly and Wright, along with director
Michael Mayer, have given us a much stronger and denser work, which takes the
celebrity luster off both the Tipi Hedren and Sean Connery characters, exposing
their far darker natures.
Fortunately, Isabel Leonard (as Marnie)
and Christopher Maltman (as Mark) are remarkable singers who take their cues
from oboe and trombone intrusions all colored with Muhly’s lyrical explorations
that occasionally remind us of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo, and other Hitchcock scores, including
Marnie.
That is not to say that Muhly’s score is unoriginal. In fact, along with Wright’s libretto, Mulhy pulls the work away
from the great film director’s version, taking its figures deeper into the
shadows of human behavior by not only repeating the heroine’s seemingly
pointless behavior, but revealing the ugly manipulation of Rutland, as, after
discovering Marnie’s role as a serial thief, forces her into a marriage and,
finally in frustration, he attempts to rape her. The end of Act I ends
violently with her attempt to slit her wrists in rejection of his advancements.
The introduction of Mark’s rather sleazy
brother, Terry (played by countertenor Iestyn Davies), moreover, takes us into
yet another dimension. This Cain-marked man—a red patch crosses his face from
birth—also allies him to the outsider if nearly-perfect looking Marnie. As
Davies recognized about his character, although he is another detestable figure
in this tale of anti-heroes, he is the truthteller, determined to make Marnie
realize who she truly is.
But, obviously—given the fact that Muhly
and Wright have literally split Marnie’s character into four other madrigal
singers, dressed and with hair coifed in a similar manner, simply with differently
colored coats, representing a few of her various identities—it is nearly
impossible for her to discover who she is. If Terry sees her as simply a liar,
she perceives herself as simply a survivor, someone who is attempting to stay
alive by challenging all the dominant men (and women) in her world who tell
her, time and again, that she is not only worthless but an evil being.
The worst of these is her own mother who
has convinced her daughter that she has jealously suffocated her baby brother
soon after his birth—an absolutely horrific possibility completely exorcised
from Allen’s screenplay. But Mark’s own mother (Janis Kelly) is not much of a
less monster for him, deciding that despite her distaste for his appearance and
morals, that Terry is perhaps more ruthless and, accordingly, better able to
run her son’s printing operation. If Kelly, in an intermission interview saw
her character as only being “strong” instead of evil, the book, in which Mark’s
mother is secretly buying up stocks in the company in order to oust mark, makes
it apparent that she too is a kind of monster. In short, no one in this opera
version is a truly good person. Each wants something from one another.
Relocated from Virginia and Maryland back
into its original location of the English countryside, it makes total sense for
Marnie to be a horse woman who prefers the beast to men. Her horse, Florio, she
luminously sings, is the only being she truly loves. But even here she is
betrayed as, when she is disgusted by the hounds who are attempting to rout out
a vixen from her den—surely a cornered beast with whom she can identify—she
turns Florio away, sending him on a wild race away from the hunt, which ends in
his disastrous stumble over a wall, Mark’s own fall into a hospital bed, and
Marnie being forced to take out a gun and kill the only thing she ever loved.
She is now finally ready to continue her
criminal career, stealing Mark’s keys and breaking into his safe. Yet something
has changed; she can no longer put the easy money she discovers into her purse.
Perhaps the very fact that he has stayed by her side, even knowing the truth,
has altered her perception of men. He may have brutally used her to capture her
as a bride, yet he has remained a kind of gentleman of sorts.
The discovery of the truth, after her
mother’s death, that it was Marnie’s mother who herself strangled her newborn,
the central character of what we now realize is a kind of study in morality in
a world with little morality to offer, beauteously thrills of her freedom at
the very moment that handcuffs our placed around her wrists. Again, unlike the
film, Marnie is not “saved” or even protected by Mark’s chauvinistic actions,
but must now make her own decisions of how to salvage her life, becoming
perhaps the only character who is truly free from the ugly controls imposed upon
others. If in her robberies she might have imagined she controlled the men for
whom she worked, she now perceives that they simply ruled her behavior, and in
that recognition becomes a kind of feminist figure able now to go her own way,
wherever that may lead her.
Marnie
may still not be a great opera, but it is certainly a fascinating one,
where the composer and librettist, often, hardly allow their characters to sing
out full sentences in a world that won’t entirely allow them to speak out any
true emotion or truth. Tumbling through the mostly exuberant score, the singers
come at last to a kind of peace with their own inabilities to express the fullness
of their lives. And Muhly’s opera transcends its own somewhat pedestrian story.
Los Angeles,
November 11, 2018
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November
2018).
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