Earthdiving represents a brave departure for the questing Spier Summer Arts Festival in the Stellenbosch winelands — an event that has become de rigueur viewing for discerning arts patrons in the Cape. Innovation is the watchword: in the 2000/01 season theatre-goers were wowed and startled by the elaborate ensemble work of the London-based Broomfield Opera Company, which created pacy polyglot hybrids, brimful of local idiom, out of well-known works of the European musical-theatre and operatic repertoire. This season artistic director Delecia Forbes and her team went further by commissioning a wholly new indigenous opera. Such an event would have been impossible without the technical and vocal resources of Cape Town Opera — seasoned veterans of the Cape’s operatic productions over the past decade. The laudably high standard of voices on stage owes much to this fine company.The pity is that the result of so much creative ferment and manifold industry proves disappointing. The problem with Earthdiving is the old South African bugbear of fudged artistic purpose: what might have been a salutary idea in the brain of a controlling visionary backfires in the minds of a committee. Many hands in the theatre do not necessarily make light work; or to change the metaphor, one cook in charge is needed to save the broth.Writers Nancy Duigud and Nan Hamilton of the Dedel’Ingoma Music-Theatre Company try to interweave Greek mythology — specifically the death-in-winter, rebirth-in-spring myth of Demeter and Pluto — with an African look and vocabulary owing much, apparently, to Khoisan ritual. However, their text is overburdened with feel-good New Age clichés, and the characters are thinly-sketched allegorical figures (‘mother earthâ€, ‘childâ€, ‘the daughterâ€, ‘father skyâ€).How are we to take this cast of windily self-important characters? The librettists believe with the utmost gravity, but it is hard to work up enthusiasm for two-dimensional ciphers who float in a kind of vaguely mythic dawn-time that lacks specificity or content — especially as these ciphers deliver speeches of turgid pseudo-poetic prose. Sarah Calburn’s set design, too, alongside costumes by Black Coffee — the work, presumably, of another committee — cements an impression of muddle, with haphazard placing of arbitrary props and equally haphazard costume accessories.Musically, the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra under the spirited Xandi van Dijk tries valiantly to enliven a score that suffers from diverse hands. Mokale Koapeng’s original score was completed by Martin Phipps and Peter Louis van Dijk (Xandi’s father); although there are plausible brass climaxes and attractive string-textured passages of what movie-soundtrack writers call ‘mood musicâ€, able orchestration cannot salvage divided conceptual purpose. There are notable performances. Marvellous mezzo-soprano Ntombizodumo Mahlaba is stirring as Namende (mother earth); her daughter Nokwanda, lyrical soprano Philisa Sibeko, has plangency and fragile grace. Baritone Mandlenkosi Mhkize oozes sex appeal as Senyaka, lord of the dead, and Abel Moeng, ground-trembling bass, wins the stage with convincing gravitas as ‘father skyâ€. One feels the voices and acting skills of all these richly talented practitioners — including the Cape Town Opera chorus, under Daniel Mestre — deserve a stronger scenario. All this is a pity because the Spier opera season has been marked by variety and vision amid professionalism — and buoyant houses in the 1 100-seater amphitheatre. Most telling is to compare Earthdiving with the other indigenous opera on the bill, The Confessions of Zeno. Here Jane Taylor’s pared but resonant libretto was finely cojoined with the Handspring Company’s ingenious puppetry, Kevin Volens’s magically taut string quartet and William Kentridge’s eerie, psyche-searing animation. The trick is that all these elements were held together in spine-tingling tension by a controlling imagination — Kentridge’s. One also sensed that, in this unique African meditation on the mores of turn-of-the-20th-century European culture, every role-player had a clear view of their immediate task — and of the greater task at hand.Ravishing in another way was Paul Stern’s production of La Traviata, which playfully turned Verdi’s tale of bohemian raffishness into a tongue-in-cheek study of romantic cliché, with a risqué staging that upset some and woke up many. The other mainstream opera, Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, became in director Janice Honeyman’s hands a fairy tale with a strongly local visual idiom — ‘shack-chic†interiors, bright with zesty logos and tinned-food label offcuts — and entirely convincing through an excellent cast.Each of these productions variously demonstrated the world-class calibre of our voices — both choral and individual — and the rich, mature vision of those at the directorial helm. Creating a stage work with the various components that opera requires is a daunting task: on present showing Earthdiving requires a determined single vision — and a ruthless rewrite — before being worthy of its first-class cast. Guy Willoughby is African correspondent of the New York-based Opera News
Earthdiving, last of the Spier Opera Season, is presented on March 14 and 15. More information and bookings: Tel: 809 1177/78 or visit the website: www.spier.co.za