A Big Disappointment

In the last of his reports from the 2024 Buxton Festival, MIKE WHEELER experiences Ethel Smyth's comic opera 'The Boatswain's Mate'

I was really looking forward to this. Ethel Smyth's music is getting the attention it deserves, at last, and the chance to see her comic opera The Boatswain's Mate was welcome - Pavilion Arts Centre, Buxton, UK, 8 July 2024.

Smyth regarded it as a feminist statement, quoting her March of the Women in the overture to underline the point. It is based on a short story by W W Jacobs, who was highly popular in his day, but this tale, at least, has not aged well. The central figure, the widowed thirty-something Mrs Waters, runs The Beehive, a pub in the seaside resort of Margate. She seems perfectly content with her single life, but she is being hassled by Harry Benn, the retired boatswain of the title, who keeps proposing, and won't take no for an answer. Ex-soldier Ned Travers turns up, and Benn spots a potential accomplice, coming up with a hare-brained scheme to finally win Mrs Waters over.

He talks Travers into staging a fake burglary, which he will foil in the nick of time, and, of course, Mrs Waters will be so grateful she'll just fall into his arms. Job done. Naturally, it all goes pear-shaped, Benn turns himself in to the police, and - wouldn't you just know it? - Mrs Waters and Ned Travers end up getting together.

Somehow, it just doesn't cohere. Smyth's own libretto, with Act I in a mixture of sung and spoken text, and an all-sung Act II, is weighed down by the clichéd English-language opera-speak of its day (1913-14), though, of course, part of the problem may be Jacobs' responsibility. For Buxton, director Nick Bond and designer Elliott Squire placed the action in the 1980s, where the spoken parts, in particular, sat awkwardly with the period.

As Mrs Waters, Elizabeth Findon was touching in the opera's best-known number 'What if I were young again', musing on the possibility of the right man coming along after all, but at more forceful moments, her voice was over-sized for Pavilion Centre's intimate space.

Joshua Baxter was an oddly colourless Harry Benn, and Theo Perry's backpacking Ned Travers seemed to spend the whole time wondering what on earth he had walked into, as well he might. Richard Woodall was a standard-issue comic Policeman, but played the part to the hilt.

From left to right: Theo Perry as Ned Travers, Richard Woodall as the Policeman and Elizabeth Findon as Mrs Waters in Ethel Smyth's 'The Boatswain's Mate' at the Buxton Festival. Photo © 2024 Genevieve Girling

Rebecca Anderson made the most of her brief appearances as a sassy Mary Ann, Mrs Waters' assistant, while tenors Brennan Alleyne and Yihui Wang, and baritones James Connolly and Hamish Garrity, were a rowdy chorus of pub regulars.

From left to right: cellist Harvey Kelly, Hamish Garrity, James Connolly, Elizabeth Findon as Mrs Waters, Yihui Wang and Brennan Alleyne in Ethel Smyth's 'The Boatswain's Mate' at the Buxton Festival. Photo © 2024 Genevieve Girling

The uncredited reduction of the orchestral part for piano trio was directed by pianist Rebecca Warren, with the players wedged into a corner at back of stage, from where they were not really able to establish a presence; they had to play the overture from behind the dropped curtain. The side-titles didn't always tally with the sung/spoken text.

It's only fair to say that the first-night audience clearly loved every minute, but for me it was a big disappointment.

There are more articles here about Buxton Festival, operatic music, vocal music, choral music, piano trio music, piano music, women composers, Derbyshire, UK and twentieth century classical music.

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The background image on this page has been derived from an illustration of St Ann's Drinking Well (1852) in Buxton, Derbyshire, UK, from between 1852 and 1895.

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