The Immortal Hour (Finborough Theatre)

The opera was one of several that Boughton, a fascinating but neglected figure in early 20th-century music, composed for his own (rather than Michael Eavis’s) Glastonbury Festival. Amazingly for an art form so often dismissed as recondite, it transferred to the West End where its initial run of over 600 consecutive performances still stands as a record for any traditional opera. Both Elgar and Vaughan Williams hailed it as a major work.

Alas, the prevailing cynicism of the last half-century did for The Immortal Hour and it’s been all but forgotten by operagoers (and, even more crucially, by companies); but in today’s era of hobbits and Harry Potter it is ripe for rehabilitation.

An earthly king, Eochaidh (Jeff Smyth), yearns for a supernatural being whom he has seen in his dreams. Dalua, Lord of Shadow (the charismatic Stiofán O’Doherty), grants his wish and makes his beloved Etain (Michelle Cornelius) human for a mortal year – or an immortal hour.

Musical Supervisor Eamonn O’Dwyer has sensitively reduced the orchestral original to a quartet comprising flute, clarinet, cello and keyboard, and Benji Sperring‘s shoestring production is pared back to fit within the tiny theatre. With so little room for expressive manoeuvre his eight-strong company squirms and gurns a lot instead amid designer Bethany Wells‘s tall, narrow stage elements.

An opera that drips with tingle moments

The score is pared back too – to ribbons – until it barely lasts a mortal hour and a bit. This is catastrophically damaging to an opera that only runs for two hours even at full length. Why truncate it? Doesn't the director trust the material, or were the singers not up to it? Certainly Cornelius, who rich alto lies fathoms below the lyric soprano voice for which her part is written, speaks many of Etain’s lines and sings the rest an octave down; but then a great deal of Eochaidh’s material is also shorn away, and this is music that the baritone Smyth would be more than capable of delivering.

To present The Immortal Hour as a set of highlights is to betray it. So much is lost, and not just in terms of its musical structure. The magical duet that closes the first scene, in which Eochaidh is lured into following Dalua, is just one among many excisions that destroy the opera’s shape.

Sperring has opted to employ musical theatre singers, which is not necessarily a bad idea in such a confined space; but they still have to be suitable. I wish I could say they were all up to the job. The Immortal Hour can drip with tingle moments but there were precious few here until the last-minute arrival of Thomas Sutcliffe as Midir, the immortal who comes to reclaim Etain. This exciting tenor, clear, powerful and even-toned, showed what had been missing earlier on as he sang the hell out of his brilliantly heroic aria ‘In the days of the great fires’ and the seductive Faery Song.