A Buxton Review

Stephen Turnbull, one of the Festival adjudicator, wrote:

5 August: DAY FIVE: Assist me, all of you!

It’s a good job that the church and the stage are closely connected. Among the advantages it brings is the facility to put on operas in church buildings. St. John’s church in Buxton, which hosts many of the Festival’s daytime events – recitals, talks etc. – isn’t the perfect operatic stage, but with its wide crossing area at the head of the nave, it is certainly a serviceable one, and today’s performance by Dunfermline G&SS of their new show The Jury’s Out fitted in quite well.

We often hear bandied about the expression “a game of two halves’, and it rather nicely fits The Jury’s Out, by Linda D Milne. The first act is completely new work in which the backstories of Sally and Richard, plaintiff and defendant, are explored by means of newly written dialogue by Linda, and songs, with words amended as appropriate, repurposed from a raft of G&S operas. The second is an adapted version of Trial by Jury, in which the dilemmas created are resolved by legal means, in a way that differs slightly from the conventional TbJ dénoument (no spoilers!) One particularly felicitous touch is the introduction of a Counsel for the Defendant, his bosom friend in Act I, who takes some of the Defendant’s verses in Act II, singing them in the third person.

The show was successfully premièred last year in Dunfermline’s Carnegie Hall and there have been several subsequent performances. This is Dunfermline G&S Society’s first visit to Buxton and The Jury’s Out thus received its English première. It’s an attractive show, eminently stageworthy, and enough happens in the first act to hold the interest. There’s plenty for the chorus to do, and all the music used is mainstream. There was some good chorus work, and several of the principals were excellent. Movement was somewhat limited by the performance space, but several entrances from the back of the church added a dimension.

I’m sure that the biggest challenge for the cast would have been to unlearn the original words in favour of the new ones. A version of that problem affects members of the Inner Brotherhood. I found it quite difficult, when a number was under way, to divorce it in my mind from its home context. But that, of course, would not be an issue for members of a general audience. Today there was a good house – nave and coffee area practically full – and they received the new work with warmth and enthusiasm.

The honorary President of Dunfermline G&SS is Frances McCafferty, and it was an absolute delight to see her enter regally as Katisha and proceed to electrify the room with those parts of the original Katisha’s role that this new Katisha was required to sing.