Review: Skin Deep
January 18, 2009
Date reviewed: 16 January 2009
Venue: Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House
Two world premieres in just over a year is an impressive record for Opera North, though, as any composer knows, the second staging can prove the difficulty. Last season’s wonderfully successful The Adventures of Pinocchio will surely return soon and is about to get new life on a DVD release, but the prospects for Skin Deep, once it’s completed runs at co-producers Bregenzer Festspiele and the Royal Danish Opera, seem to me more uncertain.
It should have been a marriage of all the talents, with David Sawer one of our most accessible opera composers, lyricist Armando Iannucci possibly the funniest of comedy writers and Richard Jones a director of wilfully eccentric inspiration – despite Opera North’s many triumphs since, his scratch’n’sniff Love for Three Oranges remains one of its finest hours. Add to this a chorus and orchestra as versatile as you possibly wish under music director Richard Farnes and you have a fail-safe guarantee of success.
Or do you? The subject matter is, perhaps, rather less appealing. Dr. Needlemeier runs a cosmetic surgery clinic in the Alps and finds himself ministering to the needs of three women: his receptionist/lover Donna with a scar from a skiing accident; his betrayed wife Lania whose birthday present each year is yet another operation; and Elsa, his daughter, who wishes her fiancé Robert to become perfect under her father’s knife. There are further complications involving a Hollywood star and a global television reporter, but it all rather jogs along, with no clear satirical targets, for something like an hour. At that point identity switches and Dr. Needlemeier’s elixir of life begins to sharpen the comedy.
Skin Deep is a pleasant entertainment, but somehow there’s not quite enough of anything: tunes, funny lines, momentum, satirical bite, even the power to shock. Any show that involves chopping off a character’s testicle ought to be more shocking than this: King Lear never had this problem.
Jones’ direction is sporadically inventive. The on-screen transformations at the Needlemeier clinic are routine and much less funny than the silly election results in a corresponding scene in Of Thee I Sing, but the scene in which the patients discard their undies and stand “naked” in wrinkled body suits has a solemn lunacy reminiscent of Three Oranges.
Stewart Laing’s excellent designs range from charming cloths of alpine scenes to a massive vat of elixir in an enclosure reminiscent of a Gustave Dore prison yard. An admirable cast could have benefited from more sharply characterised music, with Geoffrey Dolton (Needlemeier) and Mark Stone (Hollywood hunk Luke Pollock) both lacking a really over-the-top testament to self-regard, be it in the style of Escamillo, Colonel Calverley or even Captain Spaulding of Animal Crackers. Janis Kelly (Lania) and Heather Shipp (fresh from the glamorous Diana Devereaux as Donna) make much of their competitive confrontations, but rather less of their characters. Amy Freston (Elsa) and Andrew Tortise (Robert) do a nice line in naïve foolishness, Freston’s skipping self-assurance and fresh singing one of the joys of the first half – together with the non-singing part of Susannah Dangerfield, of Global Glamour TV, played by an earnest Gwendoline Christie as though she hasn’t noticed she’s six inches taller than anyone else, bad news for an undercover reporter.
Much of the most interesting music is in the orchestra and Farnes negotiates the abrupt outbursts and dynamic contrasts confidently and gives musical life to a variety of telephones (and the conversations at the other end) or the summary removal of Pollock’s testicle.
-Ron Simpson
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