Restoration romps

I suppose it doesn’t really matter how little we know about our greatest composer — and just this once I don’t mean Mr Handel but his predecessor Mr Purcell, known mostly (beyond his music) for the great length of his wig and the extreme shortness of his life. 

There is a great gulf between the late 17th and early 18th centuries — when people and lives suddenly turn familiar and relatable, London embarks on the beginnings of its modern look, even those blasted wigs start to disappear, if slowly. Henry Purcell belongs to that earlier, shadowier period of Restoration and its turbid successors, expiring in 1695 aged about 36. All we really know about him is that he lived and died within a stone’s throw of The Critic’s offices, wrote an immense amount of music for theatre and church, was very busy with official duties at the Abbey, St Paul’s and Chapel Royal, married a Catholic, and had loads of short-lived children.

He would also be in most sensible people’s top ten or twenty all-time greats: and by no means just for the crystalline little miracle of Dido and Aeneas, though it encapsulates his genius rather well. Personally I’d take the joy, generosity and sexiness of The Fairy Queen over it any day. But anyway the point is that Purcell was an authentic magus, with a breadth of sympathy and range and depth of musical expression to equal any. 

So it’s nice to see him on stage in person in Clare Norburn’s touring show, which has been modestly doing the rounds for a few years, but I only just caught up with. The genre is play-with-music (his, of course) — a bijou little genre that to my knowledge has yielded Monteverdi’s Flying Circus (crap title, nice show) by Kit Hesketh-Harvey, and Farinelli and the King (pretty poor, despite starring M. Rylance) by Claire van Kampen, and you could imagine any number of additions; combining the attractions of musical and period drama, how can you go wrong?

Purcell’s deathbed takes up most of the tiny stage of Barnes’s boutique theatre, with a harpsichord, fiddle and cello shoved off to one side. Up he springs to life, and takes us on a whistle-stop race through his life and the events (plague, fire) of the time, aided and abetted by two actor-sopranos playing his women, about whom in truth we know very little. So, fun as it is to imagine him “romping” with the 14-year-old (tops, actually) Letitia Cross — later the Butterfly-style short-term mistress of Peter the Great when he was in London — I’m not sure there’s any actual evidence for it, but it provides Mrs P with something to gripe about, which is the important thing. One lark that’s left out is the legend that Henry’s early death was hastened by being locked out by the missus on a freezing night after he’d been out on the lash.

Given how little we know about his life, and the way the show studiously avoids the professional side of it, most of what we get here is (to say the least) embellished, but none the worse for that. The main point of the whole thing is to provide pegs for the music, of which twenty-odd pieces are thereby hung, a pretty good total for a piece that runs not much more than an hour. This is all very nicely performed with expertise and heart: Oliver-John Ruthven leads precisely from the harpsichord, and two hastily-assembled singers (Laura Coppinger and Felicity Hayward) covered the songs for Sarah Lambie and Héloïse Bernard, who had both lost their singing voices but happily continued with the spoken bits. The music ranged from the knockabout catfight “A Dialogue Between Two Wives” via two extravagant solo “mad-scenes” — “Bess of Bedlam” and “From rosy bowers” — to the hit-parade stuff of Dido’s Lament and “I attempt from love’s sickness to fly”. In fact nothing was (or could ever be) better than the magical “See, even night herself is here… “ from The Fairy Queen, four hushed, pointilliste, almost Oriental strands of music weaving into a trancey incantation.

And that was the atmosphere aimed at and achieved, right there: the bewitching, elevating effect top-end music, with all its sadness and mystery, properly enacted, can have on the mildest drama. The wistful tone continued, through the deaths of children and onset of disease, but with a sense that the music just kind of happened, with Purcell, rather than being the result of endless grinding toil and divine talent, as was actually the case with all these guys. Still, like I say, it was nice to spend some time in his company, as warmly performed by Niall Ashdown.

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Touring until June 6th www.thetelling.co.uk