IF you are going to impose a construct on Mahler's Kindertotenlieder that tries to improve on the facts of his life - his wife Anna warning about the fate-tempting nature of the subject and the subsequent death of his daughter - it had better be good.
Robert Lepage has taken the half-hour song cycle and turned it into a contemporary chamber operetta, with a modern-day couple, she (Rebecca Blankenship) a singer, he (Tony Guilfoyle) a writer, coming to terms, largely unsuccessfully, with the death of their child. The acting is patchy, to say the least. Guilfoyle, whose character has been introduced since the show's London outing last May, by far the best, and what threatened to be embarrassing at the outset ultimately becomes touching. Blankenship has a delicate mezzo voice that suits the staging, Paul Suits's accompaniment is appropriately dynamic, and Blake Morrison's translations, and for the most part his between-song script, is as sharp as you'd expect. He has the girl (Annabel Dickson) coax her father to dance with ''you're not dead yet'', and another reported character has ''teeth like tombstones''. Although a very simple piece of
work by Lepage's standards, those multiple layers of metaphor are still present. Dustcloths, like shrouds, cover everything at the beginning. Mahler's spirit appears as a cross between the Grim Reaper and the Pied Piper of Hamelin to claim the girl. An oceanic journey parallels the crossing of the Atlantic with that of the Styx.
Depending on where you stand it either bravely straddles boundaries or crashes between stools. Most worryingly, however, the heart-rending emotional impact of Mahler's songs is unarguably dissipated in a production that, typically, fascinates but left me not entirely convinced.
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